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The Best SSDs

Updated January 18, 2018

Your guides

Andrew Cunningham

Ben Keough

Nathan Edwards

Whether you’re replacing an existing solid-state drive (SSD), or upgrading from a traditional hard drive to get better performance, almost every SSD you can buy today is great. But some are still better than others. If you need to buy a SATA SSD right now, we still suggest the 500 GB Samsung 850 Evo, even though it came out more than two years ago. The 850 Evo is not the fastest SATA SSD you can get, but it comes close, and more important, it has one of the best combinations of price, performance, and capacity of any drive you can buy. And it’s available in 2.5-inch, mSATA, and M.2 SATA form factors, so it’ll work with almost every computer.

Last updated: January 18, 2018

Toshiba announced its RC100 SSD in January of 2018. When it’s released in the spring, Toshiba says it should offer PCI Express performance at prices closer to most SATA drives. We’ll evaluate whether these claims are true when the drive is released in the spring; until then, we’ve added it to the What to look forward to section.

Unlike most storage brands, Samsung makes its own SSD controllers, firmware, and memory (both DRAM and NAND), which means it gets first dibs on the good stuff and is able to design the entire SSD from the start to work well as a whole. As a result, the company has a reputation for making very reliable drives. And should anything go wrong, the drive carries a five-year warranty. It also includes Samsung’s great Windows-only Magician software for easy drive installation, maintenance, and even faster transfers, and it supports full-disk self-encryption, which is necessary for some corporate use.

If the Samsung is sold out or too expensive, or you want to save money on a higher-capacity drive, get the Crucial MX300. This drive comes close to the 850 Evo’s speed and reliability, and it’s among the most energy-efficient SSDs available. It’s also a great choice for larger capacities—the 1 TB drive is $50 cheaper than the equivalent Samsung, and you still get perks like full-disk encryption and bundled software. It has a shorter warranty than the Samsung, and it’s a bit slower in some tasks, but for most people, it’s a great alternative. That said, its price has been creeping upward all year, and if it ever becomes more expensive than the 850 Evo you should check out Western Digital’s Blue SSDs instead.

Any good SATA SSD will help your PC boot quickly, speed up app launches and load times for games, and generally make your computer feel nice and responsive; most people, including gamers, don’t need anything faster. But serious video and photo editors, server admins, CAD designers, software developers, and others with workstation-style demands—anyone who is frequently loading and saving large files—may benefit from a faster drive.

If you have a legitimate need for faster storage, you should buy the PCIe Samsung 960 Evo, which can quadruple the read speeds of the fastest SATA drives and more than double the write speeds. It’s more expensive—$50 more than the 850 Evo for 500 GB and $110 more for 1 TB—and you’ll need a desktop or an M.2 PCIe-equipped laptop to use it. But the 960 Evo is a lot cheaper than our previous upgrade pick, the Samsung 960 Pro, while still delivering excellent performance. Just remember that the difference between a SATA SSD and a PCIe SSD isn’t as noticeable as the difference between a SATA SSD and a spinning hard drive.

Why you should trust us

Andrew Cunningham has spent more than six years writing about PCs and other gadgets for AnandTech and Ars Technica, and has been building and upgrading PCs for more than 15 years.

Ben Keough has written about tech for more than a decade, most recently as editor in chief of news and features at Reviewed.com; he’s also built dozens of PCs for himself, friends, and family.

Nathan Edwards tested dozens of SSDs for Maximum PC between 2008 and 2012, watching as they progressed from error-plagued, extremely expensive, and not much better than mechanical hard drives, to reliable, only moderately expensive, and much better than mechanical drives.

Since 2013, when we began recommending SSDs, we’ve been in contact with storage experts, learning all there is to know about SSD technology and gathering insights from the professionals who benchmark these drives for a living. There’s nothing we could learn by running our own benchmarks that we can’t get from the experts’ numbers—been there, done that—so we usually don’t test these drives ourselves. Instead, we consider experts’ benchmarks in the context of our knowledge of what most people actually need in an SSD, and we recommend the best drives for each type of user.

Who this is for

Buying an SSD is a great way to upgrade almost any one- to five-year-old computer that has a traditional hard drive or a cramped SSD: SSDs are much faster than hard drives at everything from booting to loading games to opening and switching between apps, and today’s SSDs are much larger and cheaper than the SSDs of yesteryear. But, in general, you should spend the money only if you plan on keeping your computer for at least another year, or if you know you can move your new SSD to your next computer: There’s no sense in upgrading a machine that you’re about to replace.

If your computer already has an SSD, the only real reason to get a different SSD is if you’re running out of room on the first one: If your drive is consistently more than 75 or 80 percent full, upgrading to a larger SSD is worth considering. Most people won’t notice a speed difference between two different SSDs unless they’re writing huge files every single day—doing stuff like editing 4K video files or designing in AutoCAD or other 3-D modeling software—and care about a few seconds’ worth of improvement. Regardless of which SSD you buy, you’re not likely to notice any lag when you’re firing up apps or launching games.

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If your computer already has an SSD, the only real reason to get a different SSD is if you run out of room on the first one.

If you have a desktop PC with room for multiple drives and you need more than 500 GB of storage, consider using our SSD pick for the operating system and programs and adding a traditional hard drive or two for media storage. Though SSDs are much less expensive than they once were, they’re still less economical than traditional hard drives for huge multi-terabyte music and video libraries.

Upgrading to an SSD can make a huge difference for those coming from a mechanical hard drive, and to maximize that advantage you should also upgrade your RAM if your computer has 4 GB or less. (You may as well do it at the same time—after all, why open up your case twice?) For most people, 8 GB of RAM is plenty and should provide a noticeable speed boost in day-to-day use. Only consider upgrading to 16 GB if you spend a lot of time in Photoshop or other high-end apps, or if you play a lot of graphically intense games.

One group that should think twice about an SSD upgrade, however, is Mac owners. Though some older (mostly pre-2013) MacBooks can be upgraded with standard SATA drives, the newest MacBooks and MacBook Pros cannot. Laptops from 2013, 2014, or 2015 often can be upgraded, but only with specialized, expensive drives from just a couple of manufacturers. (For all the messy details, skip down to our Mac section.) As such, this guide is mostly aimed at non-Mac users.

What you need to know about SSDs

If you have a computer with a mechanical hard drive, it’s likely the slowest part of your system: The rest of the computer has to wait around for information to be read from or written to the drive. Everything you do that requires accessing data on your hard drive—like booting up or shutting down, saving and loading files, launching an app or starting up a game, or rendering a video—will be much faster on an SSD.

Unlike traditional hard drives, SSDs don’t have any moving parts, which means they’re much less prone to mechanical failure. In fact, they’re better than standard hard drives in almost every respect. They use much less power, put out much less heat, and don’t vibrate. SATA SSDs are three or four times faster than standard hard drives in sequential reads and writes; PCI Express SSDs are as much as seven times faster than SATA models.

The only areas in which mechanical drives still best SSDs are price and capacity: SSDs are still more expensive than mechanical drives for the same amount of storage, and the biggest hard drives can still hold more data than the most capacious SSDs. But the price gap is narrowing: A decent SSD cost $3 per gigabyte in 2010, and $1 per gigabyte in 2012. In 2017, you can get a great SSD for between 25¢ and 30¢ per gigabyte. A good mechanical hard drive, meanwhile, costs less than 4¢ per gigabyte. And people are keeping more data in cloud storage and less on their computers—you may not need as much storage space as you did a few years ago.

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If you have a computer with a mechanical hard drive, it’s likely the slowest part of your system.

Before you buy, it’s important to figure out what kind of SSD fits your computer. At the moment, there are two different interfaces for data transfer (SATA and PCIe), two different transfer protocols (AHCI and NVMe), four different physical connectors (SATA, mSATA, M.2, and PCIe), and four different form factors (2.5-inch SATA, mSATA, M.2, and full-size PCIe). M.2 drives even come in different lengths and connector variants. Yep, it can get confusing.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the terminology:

SATA refers to both a physical connection type and the information transfer protocol that it carries. The physical connector is used by 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard drives, as well as most SSDs. If you have a desktop or a larger laptop, it can probably take a 2.5-inch SATA drive (you’ll want to get a 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch SSD mounting bracket if your desktop can fit only 3.5-inch drives). Drives using the SATA protocol also come with physically smaller mSATA and M.2 connectors. The current SATA III standard can transfer data at a rate of around 600 MB/s1, which most modern drives max out. Unless your machine has an M.2 PCIe or full-size PCIe slot, you can’t get an SSD that’s any faster.

PCIe is a faster interface that’s capable of data transfer rates of up to 985 MB/s per “lane.” Most PCIe SSDs use a four-lane (4x) interface, which adds up to a theoretical speed cap of 3,940 MB/s, or about 6.5 times faster than SATA. PCIe drives for newer desktop motherboards and almost all ultrabooks are M.2 cards, though it’s possible to get full-size PCIe cards that will fit in most recent desktops. M.2 PCIe SSDs tend to use more power than their SATA counterparts, which can slightly increase heat and reduce battery life in notebooks.

M.2 is a type of physical connector used for both SATA and PCIe SSDs; it’s used in most ultrabooks and high-end desktops. M.2 drives come in a variety of sizes, but M.2 2280 (22 mm wide by 80 mm long) is the most common. M.2 PCIe drives can also come in three different “keyings,” which determine how many PCIe lanes the drive uses. When buying an M.2 drive, it’s important to make sure you’re getting the right interface type, size, and keying for your machine, but it’s not as scary as it might sound. Almost all current M.2 drives are 2280, most SATA SSDs use B+M keying, and PCIe drives usually use M keying.

NVMe is a new interface protocol for PCIe drives, taking the place of the earlier AHCI protocol used with SATA SSDs and hard drives. Designed from the ground up to work with SSDs and other flash memory, it allows for much faster read and write speeds. Most PCIe SSDs now use NVMe.

mSATA drives were used in many ultrabooks before M.2 became common. Most new laptops use M.2, but many ultrabooks with mSATA ports are still in use, and replacement mSATA SSDs are still available (though they’re becoming rare). mSATA drives generally perform just like their 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA counterparts.

If you have a laptop, check your manufacturer’s website or use Crucial’s upgrade advisor tools to figure out what drive type your computer uses, and whether you can replace the drive. Be aware that some laptops—recent MacBook Airs and Pros, for example—use proprietary form factors that may make it difficult or impossible to perform a DIY upgrade.

How many gigabytes do you need?

Right now, most people should get a 500 GB SSD, unless you know you need more.2 Don’t get an SSD with less than 250 GB of storage if at all possible: SSDs with 128 GB or less capacity are not cost-effective, don’t have enough room for an operating system plus most people’s stuff, and are usually slower than 500 GB and 1 TB drives. A 250 GB drive is fine, but 500 GB doesn’t cost that much more and means you won’t run out of room as quickly; and some 250 GB drives are, like 128 GB models, slower than their 500 GB counterparts. At the other extreme, 1 TB drives are more or less even with 500 GB drives in per-gigabyte pricing, but their near-$300 price tags aren’t worth it unless you know you’ll need more than 500 GB of space. (That said, if you can afford it, go for it.) Drives of 2 TB and above often cost more per gigabyte than 500 GB and 1 TB drives.

If you’re buying a new computer from a company like Dell, HP, or Lenovo, you can sometimes save money by ordering a computer with a smaller SSD or a mechanical hard drive and replacing it with a larger SSD yourself. Be careful, though: Some laptop manufacturers make it very difficult to upgrade the drive by soldering it to the motherboard or requiring complicated warranty-voiding disassembly to gain access to the SSD. Make sure your new laptop is easily upgradable before going this route.

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Right now, most people should get a 500 GB SSD. Smaller drives are slower and often more expensive per gigabyte, while larger drives cost more than most people should spend on upgrading an old computer.

Drives with larger capacities also tend to be faster. That’s because much of an SSD’s speed advantage comes from parallelization. Writing for AnandTech back in 2014, Kristian Vättö3 explained, “A single NAND die isn’t very fast but when you put a dozen or more of them in parallel, the performance adds up.” If your drive has fewer modules than your controller can write to at once (that is, if it has a lower capacity), it won’t be as fast as it could be.

With today’s SSDs, you’ll get the best speeds from 1 TB or 2 TB drives, but 500 GB SSDs aren’t far behind. Lower-capacity drives often have much slower write speeds, roughly scaling with the number of NAND modules on board. The 850 Evo, MX300, and 960 Evo mostly escape this problem thanks to their TurboWrite and Dynamic Write Acceleration features, but higher-capacity versions are still faster in heavy workloads.

How we picked

For the latest update to this guide, we spent around 10 hours researching 27 SSDs, including new drives released since our previous update in November 2016, well-reviewed older models that are still around, and best sellers from Amazon and Newegg. We paid special attention to the rapidly changing landscape of SATA and NVMe/PCIe M.2 drives.

From there, we read reviews and checked Amazon listings and customer reviews for all of the drives, weeding out some older models, drives without 500 GB (or higher) capacities, and models with particularly poor reviews. We then read reviews from the sites that we know do great SSD testing—primarily AnandTech but also CNET, Tom’s Hardware, The SSD Review, StorageReview.com, The Tech Report, and a few others—and pored over benchmarks.

For the 16 drives that made the cut, we then used trusted third-party reviews and manufacturer product pages to evaluate how each drive fares on our criteria for features you should look for in a good SSD:

A good price. More-expensive SSDs are often better SSDs, but you don’t want to overpay to get extra performance or other features you likely won’t notice or use.

Good performance. Speed is the main reason to buy an SSD, after all! We checked reviews to make sure the drives hit their advertised performance figures and that they would continue to feel speedy over time.

A capacity at or near 500 GB, which currently represents the best mix of value, capacity, and speed. Capacities of 1 TB and above are a plus, though in the era of pervasive cloud storage most people probably won’t need the extra room.

For SATA drives, we preferred picks that offer both 2.5-inch and M.2 versions for maximum compatibility with different kinds of systems. The older mSATA is increasingly rare and thus wasn’t a top priority.

A decent warranty. Three-year warranties are the standard, but higher-end drives sometimes include five- or even 10-year warranties that help them stand out from the crowd.

Durability. Flash memory cells can be written to only so many times before wearing out. While most people will never come anywhere near this limit during the normal lifetime of a drive, higher endurance is a plus.

We also considered a few things that not everyone will need, but that are nice to have if you can get them:

Native support for drive encryption wasn’t a requirement for us, but all of our picks ended up including it. This feature is primarily important for businesses with specific data-privacy requirements, but it’s a nice bonus for the privacy-minded. Drives with native encryption support can offload the work of encrypting and decrypting data from your CPU, saving power and boosting speed.

Many SSDs include free data-migration software, which is a great bonus if you’re upgrading a computer with a lot of files or settings you don’t want to transfer manually.

Our pick: Samsung 850 Evo

The Samsung 850 EVO comes in a 2.5-inch SATA form factor (shown) as well as mSATA and m.2. Photo: Nathan Edwards

If we were upgrading a laptop or buying the primary drive for a desktop, we’d get the 500 GB Samsung 850 Evo (also available in M.2 and mSATA versions). The 850 EVO is fast, cheap, and reliable, and it comes from a company, Samsung, that makes its own SSD controllers, firmware, and NAND. That means Samsung gets first dibs on the good stuff and is able to design the entire SSD from the start so that its components work well together. Samsung has made some of the best SSDs for the past five hardware generations, and this one is no exception: It offers a great combination of price, performance, and capacity, plus ample write endurance, hardware encryption support,4 and an exceptionally long five-year warranty. The 850 Evo isn’t the cheapest great SSD, but it’s still the best cheap SSD, even two years after its launch.

The 850 Evo uses Samsung’s 3D TLC NAND, so it has a much higher write-endurance rating than its predecessor, the 840 Evo. The 500 GB version is rated for 150 TB of writes, which is competitive against most newer SATA drives. In real life, all SSDs should easily write many times that; wearing out an SSD before the drive itself becomes obsolete is almost impossible.

Because the TLC NAND that Samsung employs isn’t quite as fast by itself as other types of NAND, Samsung includes a feature called TurboWrite, which treats a small portion of the flash storage as faster SLC NAND and caches all incoming write operations there first before writing them to the drive. But this functionality is more important for the 120 GB and 250 GB models than for the 500 GB version. As it’s explained in a review on AnandTech, “At smaller capacities it clearly provides a tremendous performance boost, but at 500GB and 1TB there is enough NAND to provide the parallelism that is needed to max out the SATA 6Gbps interface.”

The 2.5-inch SATA version of Samsung’s 850 Evo. Photo: Nathan Edwards

The 850 Evo comes with Samsung’s great Windows-only Magician software, which lets you tweak drive settings to boost performance or extend service life. The 850 Evo comes with a five-year warranty, which is two more years than the typical warranty. This is noteworthy, not because you’re likely to need it, but because the warranty is a measure of the manufacturer’s faith in its product. This all goes back to Samsung having full control over its supply chain.

The 850 Evo, like every Samsung solid-state drive since the 830, is wildly popular. AnandTech, CNET, The SSD Review, StorageReview.com, PCWorld, The Tech Report, and other outlets all really like it. The 500 GB 2.5-inch version remains the top-selling SSD on Amazon.com, and the 250 GB and 1 TB capacities are also in the top five. The various sizes of the 850 Evo have earned a collective rating of 4.8 stars (out of five) across more than 15,300 reviews as of this writing. mSATA and M.2 SATA versions of the 850 Evo are also available in 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB sizes. M.2 versions are currently around $25 or $30 more expensive than the 2.5-inch SATA equivalents, though the performance isn’t any better.

If the Samsung 850 Evo is out of stock or you want a 1 TB drive, the Crucial MX300 is currently the best option. The 525 GB MX300 is about the same price as the 500 GB 850 Evo, and the 1 TB version is usually 10 or 20 percent cheaper than the Samsung equivalent. The Samsung still has the slightest edge for its speed, warranty, and consistency, but the Crucial MX300 is a very, very close second place.

The only potential problem with the MX300 right now is its street pricing, which has been creeping steadily upward all year: In January 2017, the 525 GB 2.5-inch version of the MX300 cost about $130, but as of this writing it’s $160, the same as the 850 Evo. If the MX300’s price continues to increase or if the 850 Evo’s price falls, Western Digital’s Blue SSDs are a good alternative. They’re not as fast as the MX300 or 850 Evo and they lack native encryption support, but they’re still good all-round drives for most people, and their pricing has been more stable.

When comparing drives of the same capacity, the MX300 is slightly slower than the 850 Evo in benchmarks such as those at Tom’s Hardware. In part, this is because Samsung uses better, more-expensive components, including an eight-channel controller and more NAND modules for better parallelization. But the MX300 has Dynamic Write Acceleration, a caching solution similar to Samsung’s TurboWrite, that creates a large buffer to significantly boost the drive’s write speeds. For most people, the speed differences will be indistinguishable.

Chris Ramseyer of Tom’s Hardware says that the MX300 “compares well” to 850 Evo drives of the same capacity. Writing for AnandTech, Billy Tallis agrees that “under ordinary consumer and end-user/home workloads, the MX300 performs at its peak near the top of the TLC charts,” a category of drives that also includes the 850 Evo and most other mainstream SSDs.

The MX300 offers slightly better advertised endurance than the 850 Evo—160 TB of writes for the 525 GB drive, compared with 150 TB for the 500 GB Samsung. It also provides many of the same features as the 850 Evo, including full-disk encryption and bundled software (including a key for the Acronis True Image cloning software). On the downside, the MX300’s three-year warranty is two years shorter than Samsung’s.

One notable advantage the MX300 can claim over its competition is efficiency. In AnandTech’s punishing Destroyer test, the MX300 consumed less power than any rival, including the already very efficient 850 Evo, delivering “remarkable efficiency for a TLC drive.” More important, it used far less power than competing budget drives, like the OCZ Trion 150—more than 50 percent less, in some cases.

Like the 850 Evo, the Crucial MX300 is popular at Amazon, with the 525 GB and 275 GB variants both in the top five on the sales charts. The MX300 is available in sizes from 250 GB to 2 TB, and though the 525 GB version of the 2.5-inch SATA drive is currently the same price as the 500 GB version of the 850 Evo, the Crucial models are less expensive at every other size than Samsung’s drive—especially if you’re buying an M.2 SATA drive instead of a 2.5-inch version. However, Crucial doesn’t make a 4 TB variant to match the 850 Evo’s $1,450 flagship.

Owners of newer laptops or desktop motherboards who truly need more speed should buy Samsung’s 960 Evo. It combines performance that’s significantly faster than SATA with the great reputation of Samsung’s SSD controllers and flash memory, as well as hardware encryption support that many other M.2 PCIe drives lack. The biggest downside is its basic three-year warranty, two years less than the older 850 Evo’s warranty.

The 960 Evo manages to be somewhere between two and four times faster than any SATA SSD in most tasks and much cheaper than the 960 Pro (our previous upgrade pick) at the same capacities.5 But it’s more expensive than our top pick, the 850 Evo: As of this writing, you’ll pay about $60 more for the 500 GB version of the 960 Evo and $140 more for the 1 TB drive. Most people won’t notice the difference between an M.2 PCIe drive and a SATA drive for most tasks—the difference between any two decent SSDs isn’t as noticeable as the gap between an SSD and a hard disk—but if you have a newer high-end system and you edit video or photos, the extra cost could be worth it if you want to cut down load times.

Reviewers like the 960 Evo’s mix of price and performance, but acknowledge that the 960 Pro is the faster drive overall. Billy Tallis of AnandTech has praised the 1 TB version of the drive for its performance consistency over time and its speed relative to competing drives from Toshiba, Intel, and Plextor. Techspot’s Steven Walton says that the 500 GB and 1 TB versions are “outstanding” and have an “unmatched price vs. performance ratio.” Tom’s Hardware’s Chris Ramseyer has been more measured in his praise of the drive and recommends staying away from the 250 GB version entirely because it doesn’t match the performance of higher-capacity versions, but he gave the 1 TB version an Editor Recommended award and says the 500 GB version is “reliable and provides a fair warranty and acceptable price.”

Installation

If you want to copy your existing hard drive over to your SSD before you install it, you’ll need cloning software and sometimes additional hardware. All of our recommended SSDs come with access to cloning software: Samsung’s SSDs all ship with the excellent (but Windows-only) Samsung Magician software; MX-class Crucial drives, including the MX300, come with a license key for Acronis True Image HD software. Otherwise you can use the free MiniTool Partition Wizard. On Macs, if you can install a new drive at all, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner.

You’ll need a way to connect your new drive to your computer while you’re cloning the old one. Desktop users need only to hook up the SSD to spare power and data cables in their PC, but laptop users with 2.5-inch SATA drives need a SATA-to-USB enclosure like this one or this one. Some SSDs come with upgrade kits that include a SATA-to-USB adapter, but getting the drive-only version and buying an enclosure is usually less expensive.

If you’re buying an M.2 SATA drive, you’ll want to get a M.2 SATA-to-USB 3.0 adapter or enclosure, like this one. For M.2 PCIe, the best option seems to be to clone your drive to a USB hard drive, then replace and clone back.

After you’ve swapped drives, you can put your old laptop drive in a USB enclosure (like the one you may have used for the new SSD while cloning) and use it for backup, if you’d like. Just be careful about doing this with spinning hard drives that are more than a few years old—you won’t want to store your backups on a drive that might fail.

If you have a Mac

Most people generally shouldn’t upgrade the SSDs in their Macs unless they absolutely need extra capacity. Many recent Macs can’t be upgraded at all, and post-2013 Macs that shipped with removable solid-state storage already use fast PCI Express storage, and the drives Apple uses are usually faster than just about anything you can buy. OWC’s Aura PCIe SSDs, while respectable enough, are slower than Apple’s own drives, and like most aftermarket replacements, they sell for way more than a normal SSD (the OWC 480GB Aura sells for almost $400, $100 more than the pricey Samsung 960 Pro).

If you can and must upgrade, know that it’s difficult to install a new SSD in most Macs, either because it’s hard to open the computer or the solid-state drives used in Macs are proprietary and incompatible with regular PC connectors.

MacBook Pros up to and including some of the 2012 models are fairly easy to upgrade with our 2.5-inch SATA picks, though there are some pitfalls we’ll discuss below. This page can help you identify your MacBook Pro, and iFixit has easy-to-follow guides that will walk you through the upgrade process.

MacBook Pro: Use this page to identify your MacBook Pro. Owners of 2012 Retina MacBook Pro models or early-2013 MacBook Pros can buy the OWC Aura 6G made specifically for those models—they’re shaped a bit differently than the drives of the same name made for the MacBook Air. MacBook Pros made in late 2013, 2014, or 2015 use the OWC Aura, the same drive OWC sells for newer MacBook Airs. No third-party SSDs are available for 2016 or 2017 MacBook Pros.

12-inch MacBook: Owners of Apple’s lightest laptop will never be able to buy storage upgrades: The SSDs in these computers are soldered to the motherboard, much like the flash storage in a smartphone or tablet.

iMac: All iMacs (aside from the upcoming iMac Pro) include space for a 3.5-inch internal hard drive, which means you could use any of our 2.5-inch SATA picks along with an adapter bracket if you really wanted to. However, these computers are extremely difficult to open and upgrade. We recommend most people consult with an Apple Authorized Service Provider to upgrade iMac storage.

Mac mini:This page can help identify your Mac mini. You can upgrade the 2012 model with standard 2.5-inch SATA drives, though as with the iMac you should probably use an Apple Authorized Service Provider to do the work to minimize the risk of damaging the computer. No third-party SSDs are yet available for the 2014 Mac mini (the current model, though “current” is a generous term), but OWC says compatible drives are “coming soon.”

Apple also doesn’t enable TRIM (an operating-system-level garbage-collection command) on third-party SSDs, though in macOS 10.10.4 and later you can force-enable TRIM via a command-line prompt. However, some Linux users have reported lost data and other bugs as a result of forcing TRIM on Samsung and other SSDs in Linux. It’s unclear if macOS would have the same bugs, but we haven’t seen any widespread reports of TRIM issues with Samsung drives. If you force TRIM, proceed with caution and keep good backups.

What to look forward to

New SATA SSDs aren’t very exciting these days, but a couple of brand-new or upcoming drives could be worth watching.

Crucial released its MX500 SATA SSDs, which will eventually replace the MX300 drives. The 2.5-inch versions are available now in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB capacities. The 1 TB M.2 drive is also available, but Crucial plans to offer additional M.2 drives in 250 GB and 500 GB capacities. Early reviews have been positive, but the MX300 will still be around for at least a few months; we’ll wait to recommend the MX500 to most people until reviewers have had more time with it and it’s available in more capacities.

Intel’s SSD 545s uses a new kind of flash memory and has debuted to good reviews, but it’s a bit pricey and available in only a 512 GB 2.5-inch SATA version. Once the planned 2.5-inch and M.2 drives are available and reviewers have more time with the drive, and we’ve been able to look at some user reviews, it could be a contender for our main or runner-up pick.

Toshiba also announced its RC100 line of PCIe SSDs in January of 2018, and the drives will be available sometime in the spring. Toshiba hasn’t said how much the drives will cost, but it says it’s aiming for performance somewhere between today’s best PCIe and SATA SSDs at a price closer to SATA SSDs. The drive is also only 42mm long, instead of the more typical 80mm; this may make it a good choice for smaller systems that leave less room for long M.2 drives. We’ll keep an eye out for reviews when the RC100 begins shipping.

Intel and Micron’s Optane SSDs promise to fundamentally shift the SSD landscape. The drives promise dramatic improvements in durability and latency compared to current SSDs. But even if they manage to deliver, the revolution is at least a couple of years away, as the only shipping versions of Optane are expensive drives for servers and tiny 16 GB and 32 GB drives that are intended to be used as cache for a slower hard drive. Intel is releasing higher-capacity 58 GB and 118 GB versions later in 2018, but they’re still likely to be too expensive (and too small) for most people. Capacity will need to go up and prices will need to come way down before Intel can deliver on its lofty promises here.

The competition

SATA and M.2 SATA SSDs
Gobs and gobs of 2.5-inch SATA SSDs are out there, and since just a handful of companies make their own flash memory and/or drive controllers, à la Samsung and Micron (Crucial’s parent company), most drives have a hard time standing out from the crowd. Most are fine, and if you find a great deal on them, you won’t be unhappy. But at current prices, there’s little reason to consider them over our main picks. We’ll list a few highlights, skipping over drives that appear to be out of stock or otherwise on their way out.

Western Digital’s Blue SSD, a rebranded and tweaked version of SanDisk’s X400, leads the pack here. The drives are available in both 2.5-inch SATA and M.2 SATA flavors and capacities up to 1 TB, and they’re currently a little less expensive than the MX300 or 850 Evo. But they fall behind our main picks, with somewhat lower performance and a lack of hardware-encryption support. However, AnandTech’s Billy Tallis says the drives offer slightly better endurance and “decent well-rounded performance with no major shortcomings.”

Crucial’s BX300 is a new budget SSD that’s about $10 cheaper than the MX300 right now. Reviewers like its performance, and it does much better than the older BX200. But because it doesn’t have hardware encryption support, doesn’t come in 1 TB or M.2 versions, and is only a little cheaper than the MX300 currently, we still think most people will be happier with the MX300 or the Samsung 850 Evo.

Samsung’s 850 Pro remains a top-of-the-line SATA drive three years after its introduction, but at this point people who want a faster, better SSD than our top pick should be looking at PCI Express drives, not SATA: Drives like the 850 Evo and MX300 are significantly cheaper, but not all that much slower. The 850 Pro has a 10-year warranty and its MLC flash memory is faster and has better endurance than that of the 850 Evo, but there’s no M.2 version, and these days SATA is just too slow for a high-end drive.

The following drives appear to be good enough and readily available, but they lack encryption support, include three-year warranties, and are usually slower than our main picks: ADATA’s Ultimate SU800; Toshiba OCZ’s Trion 150; and SanDisk’s Ultra II. Any of these drives could be worth considering if they come down in price or you find them at a significant discount, but right now they cost about the same as the 850 Evo and MX300.

PCIe NVMe SSDs
Most of the best PCIe NVMe drives perform at roughly the same level as (or below) Samsung’s 960 Evo. Most people should stick with the 960 Evo, but a handful of alternatives could be worth considering for people with specific needs.

MyDigitalSSD’s BPX, which currently sells for $20 less than the 960 Evo, is an intriguing option. Its write speeds are often lower than those of the 960 EVO, but it’s still considerably faster than any SATA drive. It uses MLC flash and is rated at over three times the endurance of the 960 Evo, a number backed by a five-year warranty. We still think the 960 Evo is the better drive for most people for a few reasons: Tom’s Hardware cites potential laptop battery life problems for the BPX, and the drive tops out at 480 GB (the capacity we recommend, but a 1 TB option is nice to have); and based on both the Tom’s Hardware review and a look at the drive’s Amazon history, we think Samsung will be able to keep its drive in stock more consistently.

Samsung’s 960 Pro, our previous upgrade pick, is expensive and overkill even for many pros, but if you absolutely need the best, fastest drive you can get, the 960 Pro is still at the top of the pile. The relationship between the 960 Evo and the 960 Pro is basically the same as the relationship between the 850 Evo and the 850 Pro. Because drives with multi-level cell (MLC) flash don’t rely on TurboWrite or Dynamic Write Acceleration caches for speed, they can offer faster and more consistent performance for pros who write a ton of data to their drives at a time. But, unfortunately, MLC drives are usually significantly more expensive than drives with triple-level cell (TLC) drives. As of this writing, a 512 GB 960 Pro is $80 more than the 512 GB 960 Evo, and a 1 TB Pro is $130 more expensive than the corresponding Evo. But if the speed, the extra endurance, and a five-year warranty are worth it to you, the 960 Pro is still an option.

The other drives fall into the good-but-not-great category: None of them are bad, but there aren’t many reasons for most people to choose them over the 960 Evo. Western Digital’s Black is cheaper than the 960 Evo and has a five-year warranty, but it lacks hardware encryption support and is slower than the Samsung drive. The Patriot Hellfire, Toshiba OCZ RD400, and Plextor MP8e are decent drives, but they’re all a little more expensive than the 960 Evo and offer similar performance but no drive encryption. Intel’s 600p is the same price as the BPX and WD Black drives but generally brings up the rear, performance-wise.

Footnotes

The theoretical maximum, 6 gigabits per second, actually translates to 750 MB/s, but because of encoding and other transfer overhead, the practical maximum is around 600 MB/s.

Hardware support for full-disk encryption is mostly useful for businesses, where encryption is often required. Using encryption on disks that don’t have hardware support for encryption can make the computer slower, because the processor has to do all the encryption/decryption work—SSDs with built-in encryption support won’t slow down your machine.

Amazon was sold out on day 1. Newegg had the drives in stock and I found a 10% of code that saved another $18 off the top.

Brian

I hope I get some feedback on this question. I know I’m a few days late. I have an older MBP with a 3gb interface. I got a reply from OWC about which drives would work best for me. They said this: “While a 6G SSD does function, it will only do so at SATA Revision 1.0 (1.5Gb/s) speeds rather that the SATA Revision 2.0 (3.0Gb/s) speed the machine can deliver. Should owners of these machines desire another SSD option, the Mercury Electra 3G SSD does run at the full SATA Revision 2.0 (3Gb/s) specification.”

So your suggestion of always going with a 6gb drive may not be the best course of action. Is there any way to find out which drives will run at the SATA 2.0 revision?

Anonymous

Does the Samsung Pro have Turbowrite? Do we know how the Samsung EVO with Turbowrite compares to Samsung Pro?

I’d love an article about this: Is it worth getting a hybrid drive for a fraction of the cost of an SSD?

How_delightful

I had to alter something in the bios; then I installed Intel SSD software accidentally along with the Samsung version (I thought the Intel chips on the motherboard might need the Intel SSD driver software) and the SSD slowed right down.

Its not easy or simple for most people (Noobs to SSD), as the millions of bits of information are all over the place.

DhrubaJDeka

Looks like this site also has Samsung brand M.2 SSD’s available too, but just for Australian buyers.

Note, however, that current ASUS motherboards with a M.2 socket are just single lane PCIe only, whereas the M.2 SSD drives will be 4-lane PCIe capable. On a single PCIe lane M.2 socket, the drive will max out at about 500MB/s sequential read. Once 4-lane M.2 sockets are available, these drives will max out at well over 1500MB/s sequential reads, according to tweaktown.

Triny

According to Samsung website the EVO uses MLC Nand Flash? In this article it is mentioned TLC is used. Could you confirm please? If this is the case then the EVO is better than the Pro in all situations correct?

Just got word from our editors on this matter specifically. Direct quote “Three bit MLC=TLC. M stands for multiple, T stands for triple.” & “Typically people use MLC for two bit per cell, as opposed to SLC (1 bit per cell). But TLC NAND is also MLC.” Thanks for the great question though!

I just made another purchase because of a wirecutter article. I love this site!

CodePaisley

In case anyone trips over these recommendations in the late 2013 time frame, like I did, and doesn’t keep up with business news, OCZ Technology has filed for bankruptcy. I’d steer clear of all OCZ drives because you can pretty much expect zilch in terms of support until the company’s future becomes clearer. (Toshiba wants to buy some of OCZ’s assets, but who knows what that means for current customers.)

jakeflagg

Bought an OCZ450 128GB SSD to replace a 320GB HD that came with my Acer netbook. I could easily get along with a 64GB SSD because I don’t store a lotta junks on any computer; less than 17GB with a W7, <2GB with XP, and <512MB with Linux I use. Except for files I use everyday, very small, those numbers are mostly OS size. Media stored elsewhere.

The Acer booted W7 in about 120-30 seconds and Linux in about 30–why people still use MSFT is beyond me. After the SSD install W7 booted in 30 seconds and Linux in <20. However, to show how much CPU kind dictates speed, the Acer has a C-60 with 4GB ram; this Dell 17.3 an i5, 8GB ram, and 1TB WD HD–W7 [came with W8, but reducing price got W7–neither which I really wanted] boots in <30s & Linux <20s. I must point out that I use GRUB in a chainload config, generally from a USB2 port. A Linux live USB3 stick of Xubuntu boots [& runs] in <30s from the stick. I should install GRUB on the HDs, but I have the installs of various Linux to USB & SDHC so DOWN that I can install many, and setup OS, FF, Opera, Geany [editor+], in ten or fifteen minutes.

If I gamed this would mean more, but I find I'm using computers less & less. The tabs I picked up recently mostly sit on the shelf, and don't do cell phones.

Bottom line, what everyone knows–SSDs rule. If you don't keep a lot a junks on your computer, the cheapest SSD you can find will be of benefit. The hard part for most is drive cloning. The Linux I use come with all programs to do the deed. OCZ purchase let me download Acronis which will do the deed–and did perfectly. The Acronis software does much more, but to access that it must be purchased.

Molly

molly

Owen Cunningham

no mention of OWC (Other World Computing)?? They’re fantastic. Diglloyd has extensive reviews of their sustained write/read speeds vs. all of these competitors. OWC drives, and I have one in my Macbook Pro, are fantastic

Make sure that you take a look at the PNY Optima SSD when doing the update to this guide. With a $20 rebate on Newegg, it’s incredibly cheap at $90 for 240GB and is very fast.

disqusTION

Any word on when the new updated recommended SSDs are coming?
On June 23rd, you posted that there were some new drives coming soon, but I’m not sure if that means like “in a couple of weeks” or more like “the upcoming holiday season”. I’m anxious to by an SSD soon, but if I can wait a couple of more weeks and get something better, I’m all for that.

From above: “You won’t be getting a bad drive if you buy now, and our picks are still great drives, but it could be worth waiting, especially if you’re eyeing our step-up pick.”

So if you’re considering our step-up pick it might be best to hold off for a bit. I can ping you as soon as it’s ready – OR – if you’re not familiar with our newsletter we often give subscribers a heads up a week in advance when a new pick is incoming. If you want to stay ahead of the game & aren’t already a subscriber, here ya go!

So the best SSD page was just updated TODAY (July 31st), but it looks like the recommendation is still the same Crucial MX100.

Is this the article-update that was referred to last month—like,

“we’ve taken another look and, remarkably, (other than the “Step up” Samsung) the MX100 is STILL the best over-all SSD as of July 31st…”

or was the “if you can hold off a bit” referring to another event that is still yet to come (I mean obviously, SSDs will continue to get better and better as the years go by)?

So, if you were going to buy an SSD today to replace a spinning HD in a “early-2011” Macbook Pro, would you buy the MX100, or wait X number of days/weeks for some new announcement that was expected on such-and-such a date?

If would be great if an estimated date for the updates were given. That would help give us an idea if we can wait or not. If it’s a week from when I land on this page, I’ll wait. If it’s a month, I’ll probably just by now.

Henry Abarbanel

I have now used both the Samsung 840 EVO and the Crucial MX 100 SSD’s to replace 512 GB in two different laptops. Neither comes with a SATA 3 to USB connector–you have to buy it separately.

The Crucial does not come with Image Cloning software so you can copy your existing system to the SSD and use it. If you buy from Amazon, they promise such software which you can download, but that is fantasyware, not reality.

The Samsung comes with well presented and operating software for the transfer of the disk image and another program for maintaining the SSD. These software items easily make up for the difference between the products. Crucial is really not there as a package which allows you to change over from a Hard Disk to an SSD; Samsung is. I highly recommend going with the 840 EVO–or any successors.

Tracker

I decided to go with the EVO 250GB since it was on sale for $120 ($10 more than the crucial). The main reason is when Googling most people say they never had any problems with Crucial, but a few people here and there mentioned they had multiple problems and recommended Samsung. I couldn’t find anyone saying anything similar about Samsung. When I got my EVO I couldn’t believe how stupid easy the migration from the HDD to SSD was. The Crucial product description says it comes with a “free download” for imaging software, but even so it can possibly be easier than the Samsung software. Plus you get the toolbox/utility thingy with Samsung too. So with the software and the perceived slight reliability gains I think the EVO is worth the little bit extra.

Tracker

Has anyone had experience replacing a laptop dvd-rom bay with a hard drive caddy and upgrading to an SSD that way? With how cheap SSDs are getting it kinda sounds like a no brainer. Having a laptop with a 256gb SSD and 750 gb HDD would mean I would probably never need to buy another computer again, barring mechanical failure. The only problem is I can only find these things from Chinese eBayers and other shady looking sources. Why don’t they sell these things at Fry’s or Best Buy? They sound so awesome.

I actually did this with my MacBook Pro. I bought a generic one from Amazon, but there are a few reputable makers of these – however they do charge a premium for being ‘brand name’. I don’t recall the name of the branded company, but once I do I’ll let you know!

-And yes I wish Microcenter or other places carried these as well. I’d feel better buying them from a brick & mortar store with a clear warranty/return policy.

Tracker

I went ahead and ordered the generic Chinese bay since it was at least advertised as a replacement for my specific ROM (of course I have no way of knowing if they’re just saying that). Expected delivery was 4 weeks! Oh well. I already got and installed my amazing SSD, and I’m using a 64GB flash drive in lieu of a second hard drive in the mean time. Hopefully it works the way I imagine it will.

MrEd

Crucial M550 1TB is now $400 on Amazon v 840 EVO @ $444. Is the Samsung still a better deal?

I assume you mean for a desktop. If you don’t have an SSD at all right now, but you do have 6Gbps SATA ports, I’d say it’s worth buying one now. Since PCIe drives are just coming out, you’ll get better bang for your buck with an SSD. And most people won’t notice the speed difference between a good SATA SSD and a PCIe SSD.

Both OS X & Windows have migration/backup programs built into the operating systems. I think for cloning the first programs that come up for any seasoned user be SuperDuper & CCC (OS X) & DriveImage XML & Acronis (Windows). However, I’ll forward this along to our experts to see what they have to say!

Tracker

I have to say the Samsung migration software was great. For a laptop you need a USB to SATA cable (I cannibalized an old portable hard drive for this), or if it’s a desktop you could just install the SSD to an existing bay. It was literally 2-3 clicks, wait about 35 minutes (I had about 40 gigs of info on my old drive), then swap the drives. Stupid easy.

Does the Samsung migration software come with a SSD, or is it something you download from their site?

Tracker

I don’t remember if it came with a CD, after all I did replace my CD drive bay with a hard drive bay. But for software like that and drivers it’s always best to download it anyway to make sure you’re getting the most up to date version.

Comment Zilla

OWC drives has been a great for me. I have two, a SATA and mSATA.

Jason Chollar

Yeah, why not review the OWC drives?

Echo

Why not review Renice Drives? I heard that they deliver the industrial grade SSD.

Sorry for the delay, Tony. It’s a 2009 Macbook Pro running 10.9.4., with a Samsung 840 SSD. I’m waiting to see if new iMacs are coming, because I want a bigger screen, but I would be interested if you have any thoughts – I’m going to keep the MBP as a spare machine, so I’d like to improve this situation if I can.

MxPr

Those 2009 Nvidia chipset Macs (every one of them) has issues with many SSDs. The symptoms you point out are common first symptoms before the data on the SSD becomes too corrupted to read. Best way to go is a Crucial for those Macs.

winstonsmith39

Thanks for the info. Any one of their range in particular?

MxPr

I have read about then tried the M500. It seems to be very compatible with the Nvidia chipset. I haven’t tried the newer MX100 or M550 yet. Since the Nvidia chipset supports only up to SATA II (3Gbps), the newer and faster M550 isn’t necessary. Both the M550 and MX100 uses the same, slightly newer Marvell controller, so I suppose the only thing unknown is the firmware.

Tracker

Did you ever download the “Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software”? It fixes a bug where there was a slow down reading old data. I was suffering significant slowdowns even though I only had it 2 months. After I installed the fix it was just as fast as day 1.

I would definitely try what @Tracker:disqus recommended. There’s a solid chance it may restore speeds. But please, if you do try, back up all your data first.

seancaldwell

imo, something is odd with your setup. I had one laptop that came with an SSD that exhibited some weird pauses as well and could never figure out what was going on…drove me nuts. The other 8 machines with SSD’s around our office are blazing fast…and noticeably faster than the machines with traditional HD’s.

I don’t know if that is a good option as I’ve only ever heard of it the opposite way (that is how mine is setup now – main bay SSD, optical bay HDD).

John Smith

“You should also upgrade your RAM first if you haven’t already. More RAM (up to about 8 GB) will make even more of a difference to your computer than going from a hard drive to SSD.”

Can you elaborate on this? I’m deciding between the two right now (if I don’t end up getting both) and it seems to me the two would do rather different things in terms of speed/stability. Would you recommend the RAM over the SSD in every case?

seancaldwell

if you have 4 gig already, definately the SSD. If you have only 2 gig, I can’t say for sure. There’s one machine I use that has only 4 gig and an SSD made quite a difference in the overall feel of the machine.

John Smith

I have 4 gigs but it seems like I’m always using it all even if I only have a few programs running. I do have 64bit W7 so more than 4 gigs would probably make a difference for me, no?
I have this idea that an SSD would increase overall speed but not, for example, switching between programs.

seancaldwell

John, I’d agree that switching between already open programs would not benefit that much by an SSD. But opening up programs, loading files, copying, etc. would benefit a lot from an SSD. You mention always using the 4 gigs of memory you have; are you doing things like photoshop or other memory intensive programs? If so, 8 gigs would help a bunch. Wish memory prices were back to where they were a couple years ago.

John Smith

Right now, aside from basics like Win Explorer and other background tasks, all I have running is Chrome. This takes up 75% of my 4GB.
I don’t really use Photoshop or anything like that anymore so the only other intensive memory usage comes from gaming. I guess gaming would benefit more from RAM than from an SSD but it’s bottlenecked by my video card anyway.

Nathan Edwards

In your case I’d go for the RAM first.

baloot

Honesty for “most” users you should switch to the SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB.

Looking at the link you sent, it shows that our top pick, the Crucial MX100, is better overall and it labels in the final “Conclusion” “SanDisk: Almost Good” | “Crucial: Good”, meaning the Crucial succeeds where the SanDisk falls short. The only area the SanDisk seems to beat the Crucial was in ‘Value & Sentiment”, but that’s based on incorrect prices posted on UserBenchmark. The Crucial at 256GB is going for $112 on Amazon right now and the SanDisk at 256GB is going for $114, making the Crucial a better bargain price-wise (even if only saving $2).

We mention the Crucial isn’t the fastest in the second sentence on this guide (it’s in the lede).

If I bought a solid-state drive (SSD) today, I’d get the 512GB Crucial MX100 for about $220. It’s not the fastest SSD you can get, but it’s close. More importantly, it has the best combination of price, performance, and capacity. Additionally, Crucial makes its own NAND flash memory and its SSDs have a history of reliability. It’s about $30 cheaper than the 500GB Samsung 840 EVO and has the best price per gigabyte of all those we looked at, so it’s the best choice for most people who are upgrading a laptop or desktop today.

Our mission is to recommend the best things for most people – to do extensive research so the common person doesn’t have to.

baloot

Yea that was my point. The SanDisk was a better value per dollar at $87. You are remaking my point. The SanDisk isnt the fastest but its fast enough, and was a killer deal at its price until I posted the link and people bought it up.

You should still mention the M550 as a runner up next to the EVO since it uses MLC instead of TLC, plus its like one of three 1TB drives in existence.

It’s our backup pick and as we note – it’s still great. I think that’s ok for now 🙂

mados123

Great article here. I plan on using the Samsung 850 Pro for video capture and editing but also wanted to use the Full Disk, Hardware Encryption feature with it minimally affecting performance (especially writing). Any suggestions as to which mode to use as said by Samsung Magician (Class 0, TCG Opal, MS Encrypted Drive)? Thanks!

I was going to make a post a while ago about how I wouldn’t recommend the EVO anymore. I only had it for a few months and was slowdowns, even though this error was supposed to only affect data a year+ old. My Seq Read/Write went from 550/530 to 300/230 over 2 months. However I downloaded the fix they made, and my numbers went back up to 550/530.

In short, they fixed it.

KP

Brilliant that you footnote your sources. Thanks for an excellent roundup article.

Stangelove

I wonder if I should buy a 500GB SSD or an 250GB, I’m going to put the SSD in the optical bay of my mid 2012 macbook pro, and use the stock 500GB HDD as storage. I just want to put the OS, the applications and other little stuff on the SSD, and store music and movies on the HDD, since I’ve heard that SSD crash, if they do, without warning. It has just put an irrational fear of the SSD’s in my mind, for storage use at least, I still believe in the HDD. P.S. What would be a good buy in 250/256GB category, and Samsung or Crucial for 250GB?

We rec the MX100. If you really feel that the Samsung is better, there is a fix coming for bug. I personally have an EVO now and am getting the MX100 as my next SSD (probably when I upgrade to Yosemite).

Juan Claudio

I have the 840 EVO in my Macbook Pro 2011, it never really worked. You mentioned there is a fix coming. Is like a Firmware Update?

Adam

any opinion on the sandisk ultra II ? It’s out now and it’s priced comparable to the MX100

What to look forward toSanDisk just announced the Ultra II budget SSD. Its prices are similar to those of the Crucial MX100, and it uses SanDisk’s 19nm TLC NAND. It will be available in September and could be a great choice if it’s competitive with the Crucial MX100 on speed.

Adam

Yea, I read that above – it’s out now. What’s the verdict, is it competitive with the MX100 on speed?

Adam

Love to get an opinion on that, in case it goes on sale in the next few weeks

Can you elaborate with links or any info backing this up? Or is this just your personal experience. Mine is running fine 2+ years.

Daniel Gray

“You should also upgrade your RAM first if you haven’t already. More RAM
(up to about 8 GB) will make even more of a difference to your computer
than going from a hard drive to SSD.”

This is nonsense, especially if you have 4GB of RAM, which is the starting place for most systems made in the last couple of years.

An SSD will make a HUGE perceived speed increase over a HDD, and jumping up to 8GB of RAM will not.

Everything is faster with an SSD; things are only quicker with more RAM if you were maxing it to begin with, and even then it’s still only moving at the speed at which your HDD can give it the info.

I don’t know why you think that RAM is a better upgrade than an SSD, because simply the entire tech community would NOT agree with you. Google it see what I mean.

Tracker

I think people have that perception because that’s how it used to be. It wasn’t that long ago that budget computers and laptops came with only 256MB of RAM, and you couldn’t add enough. But those days are gone. I agree with you, 4GB of RAM is more than enough except for a few specific RAM intensive uses.

I think the point there is if you’re looking for an increase in speed, doubling your RAM might be enough and is 10x easier than installing an SSD. In my last few machines it’s always been add RAM for minimum speed increase, then SSD for max speed increase.

Tenny

I agree with about upgrading the RAM, only if your computer is using more like my MacBook Pro did. I’ve upgraded to 8GB & have noticed my Macbook to run smoother, certain stuff to work quicker than before plus it was cheaper option than the SSD + a short term solution. But I’m now looking to upgrade my HD to a SSD for the total upgrade on my MacBook.

Kaven Bouchard

And what about the warranty?. Because I heard some awful history about “Crucial Warranty”. Like they give you “fair market value” example 0.25$/GB refund if your SSD is not longer available and still on warranty.

Simon

And what about the warranty?. Because I heard some awful stories about “Crucial Warranty”. Like they give you “fair market value” example 0.25$/GB refund if your SSD is not longer available and still on warranty.

Joe

Now Crucial MX100 512GB and Samsung 840 EVO 500GB are priced equally at Amazon, so which one would you recommend?

We like them both, but currently rec the Crucial. Go with your gut, and use this guide as crutch!

Max

SSD = Samsung

hd_sporty

I have a laptop with a 80 GB SSD and a 1 TB HHD and I’m wondering if its wise to swap out the HHd for the MX-100, for I’m not worrying about storage, I’m also using a NAS. thanks for any input on this.

Can you fit everything you currently have on the 1TB HDD onto the MX-100 you have your eye on?

Alfred Alarcon

Hi Tony, and yes, for I only have 120 GB of programs that I use and every thing else goes on my externals drives. I just would’nt know how to set it up if I did go that route. Thank for the feedback.
AL.

Buy an external HDD enclosure and plug it in, then use a program to clone the entire drive. Or reverse that – install the new drive, format it, then plug your old HDD into the enclosure and copy from that to your new drive inside your computer. I’ve done it. Makes for a good Saturday afternoon task with a treat after for job well done!

Alfred Alarcon

Hi Tony thanks for the reply and That is what I’ll do for a weekend project. Thanks again

I bought this drive based on your recommendation but have now returned it. It caused my laptop to just freeze soon after Windows started and this appears to be a common problem. Some people managed to fix it by removing the atrocious software that comes with it but that didn’t work for me. Crucial have not released new firmware and don’t respond to emails.

And does formatting the SSD not remove this software? If it does then this shouldn’t really matter. When installing a new SSD/HDD, it’s always best to format it yourself prior to use.

farawayplace

I have to reiterate what was said by Tim. The Crucial MX100 caused me great pains when upgrading my HP Pavilion computer. The Crucial site is rife with people who have the same problems (as is the HP site). HP site people recommend going with the Samsung EVO models. The Crucials will cause: “Boot Device Not Found. Please install an operating system on your hard disk. Hard Disk (3F0)”

I was (eventually) able to make my Crucial work… going on 3 weeks now with no issues. I had to pull a few bios shennanigans, to do it (disabling Secure Boot and resetting Boot Keys).

In any case, thanks to Windows 8, it seems the computer manufacturers like HP have been able to force people into kind of a hell when they try to upgrade. Best to check your computer manufacturer’s site and seek advice as to what SSD’s are working for people when they upgrade, and any settings in bios that need to be changed. This information will help you determine between Samsung or Crucial.

Frank Herrera

Can you explain how did you make it work? My laptop is a HP Pavilion 2323DX. I am experiencing the same “Boot Device Not Found” issue, I am honestly about to return this Crucial MX100.

farawayplace

I am working from memory, Frank, but something in the series of things I did made it work. One was to turn off (and leave off) secure boot in bios. I also had to clear (reset?) the boot keys from the same bios menu. The third thing had to do with changing something within Windows UEFI (did I spell that right?). I think I needed to basically reset that, too, from within Windows. In any case, the problem only happens now when a program hard freezes due to an error, causing me to hold the power key down to shut down. That causes the boot error screen again, and like before, just entering and leaving bios causes it to “find” my SSD again and boot.

farawayplace

And one more thing…. Go to the crucial web forum update drive firmware, and download their tool to check for errors. My drive was also kicking out errors that the Crucial tech said were due to a poor connection. He had me unplug the drive and replug it. Oddly, that made it work. I have read others with the same issues, and wonder if unplugging/replugging in the drive causes something in UEFI to “wake up” and start recognizing the drive. I have no idea, but try it, after resetting things I mentioned earlier.

farawayplace

I just want to add that Crucial has come out with a new Firmware update for the MX100 drive. Best to look into that!

BrazenRain

Glad you mentioned the 850 Evo. I pre-ordered the $500GB version from Newegg for $250 with an extra $25 cash back via American Express. Probably a good deal?

Unibody? If so, you don’t just “pop” it out, you have to loosen a bracket & take it out. Do you plan installing your OS from scratch? Or cloning your current drive over to the new SSD?

Marc Cardwell

hi tony, a late 2011 is indeed a unibody. i know it doesn’t “pop” i meant that it was an easy operation, sorry for not being clear. i’ll use super duper to clone the drive. according to crucial’s site, my mac is compatible. thanks for your reply!

Bill Smith

If you go to the Crucial site to look at the SSDs, you’re prompted for your computer model, and then you’re taken to a page that’s specific to that computer model. The SSDs for that computer model will have different part numbers from the generic
CT512MX100SSD1 listed on Amazon. As of this moment CT512MX100SSD1 on Amazon is $199, whereas the model-specific SSD listed on the Crucial site is $229. So here’s a thing to know: I asked a Crucial customer support person whether the model-specific SSD was any different from CT512MX100SSD1, and they said they’re exactly the same thing.

I think the proliferation of model IDs will be confusing to the casual shopper. At the same time, I can think of legitimate reasons to assign a different model ID for every computer model. And it’s not usual for the Amazon price to be lower than the price on the manufacturer’s web site.

I was worried about manually triggering the garbage collection on a Mac computer, and the hassle that would be. According to the page linked in the review though, maintaining optimal performance is as easy as this:

– Go to System Preferences
– Go to Energy Saver
– Make sure ‘Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible’ is unchecked.

There are two new Crucial models: a budget one (BX100) and a high performance one (MX200), any information in how they compare to the Top Pick and Step up? Currently the BX100 500 GB is just 9$ less than the MX100, it does not seem worth the difference, but it will probably go down I guess…

Nathan

The Samsung 850 EVO 500GB is currently $199 on Amazon.

Nathan Edwards

Thanks, we’re on it!

Will Taylor

And what about for iMacs? I have a 27″ 2009 iMac that’s stating to slow down a bit (amazing that it’s as fast as it is being a 6-year-old desktop). Laptops before and after 2013 are mentioned, but nothing about desktops. Same issues or different concerns? As always, thanks!

For an iMac, you’ll need a 3.5 inch adapter/kit. The iMac’s internal parts fit together like a very intricate puzzle. You won’t be able to securely place one of the SSD’s mentioned above into the iMac’s HDD bay. The brackets won’t fit and you’ll leave the SSD dangling. Here is a good guide to help you see what’s ahead of you, were you to take on this project. It’s fairly simple I’ve done it a few times. Hardest part is getting the display/screen off. Magnets can be difficult!

jeaguilar

I think the harder part is in getting the display/screen back on since the magnets will snap those screws away and into the case. Usually after you’ve installed 7 of the screws back in! Tweezers are your friend here.

socialdesigner

I purchased the 850 EVO 250GB SSD and installed it last week in my Late 2011 MacbBook Pro 17″. It was very easy to install. This tutorial video from TUAW is good for most MacBook owners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJHMQlvPEz0

The drive is super fast and noticeably so after using an OWC 6G 120GB SSD for the past three years. Blackmagic Speed Test benchmarked the Read/Write speeds for the Samsung at 500mbps in most tests. I could barely get 150mbps in my OWC 6G, although OWC says Blackmagic isn’t accurate.

Important Note for Mac Users Restoring from Time Machine: I formatted the drive’s partition, set it to GUID, then I tried to do a Time Machine restore to the new drive. Unfortunately, the 850 EVO drive would boot halfway then hang.

So I found out that Time Machine Restore may not work with new drives, so I went back, erased the 850 EVO drive and installed a fresh version of OSX Yosemite from an external USB Flash drive. I was successfully able to boot afterwards, then I used the migration tool in Time Machine to get back up and running.

Overall, I am very happy with the Samsung EVO 850 – 250gb. Now if I can just figure out if I need to use Trim Enabling or not. Most people have recommended against it on Yosemite due to kext signing security that you have to disable in order for TRIM to work.

I would love to hear from other MacBook Pro owners who are also using the Samsung 850 EVO.

JR

I’m looking for a larger SSD for my desktop computer right now as I have the Intel 335 180GB in it right now. I have the Crucial MX100 512GB in my Lenovo laptop (both W7 HP 64) and the Crucial drive has worked flawlessly. But, will the new Crucial MX200 500GB offer any benefits over the MX100 as the price is very close? Please advise, thank you!

Nathan Edwards

No, and unless you need hardware-assisted full-disk encryption you can probably skip the MX200 and get the BX100 instead. It’s cheaper and just as fast in most tests.

ssdmananger

MX200 has twice the endurance, temperature throttling, raided-nand, and slc cache, and is only $20 more at the 500GB drive. Worth it for the longevity alone.

Kmoney

1 TB 850 evos Going for $360 on amazon. and the 250 GB for $100. I think that gives the current edge to the evos 🙂

Any recommendations for M.2 Type SSDs? I want to upgrade the 128GB SSD on my 2015 Dell XPS 13 to 512. I see that Crucial has an upgrade kit (Crucial MX200 500GB), but wasn’t sure how it compares to other options.

bluestreak_v

For a desktop, where you can go with a smaller SSD plus a large HDD for storage, the EVO 850 in 250GB is currently cheaper than the 250GB BX100 (mid April 2015). Its $95 for the EVO vs the BX100 at $99 (on Amazon).

As an aside, I’ve found Macrium Reflect to be a very useful, relatively friendly, and free way to clone hard drives. I’ve used it at least a dozen times to clone boot and data drives, and it’s been rock-solid for me. If you want an easy way to back up a disk image or clone a drive for a SSD upgrade, I highly recommend it!

Salomon

For my 2011 MacBook Pro on Yosemite, I’m between the OWC Mercury Electra 480 GB and the Samsung 850 Evo 500 GB. The Samsung has 2 years longer warranty, longer endurance, 20 GB more usable space and is cheaper but OWC guarantees their drive will continue to maintain top performance without TRIM which can’t be enabled in Yosemite without causing issues. Can the Samsung 850 Evo be used in the same circumstances without TRIM?

This always stuck out to me when personally looking at SSD’s for my Mac during the post-TRIM Enabler app era-

Most of the newer SSDs now have their own built-in garbage collection, but they tend to be less effective (than TRIM) although they are doing the same job.

And although I’ll be forwarding this to our expert, I’m pretty sure you can guess which one sounds like the better option 🙂

Tara

I’d love to see the update on this as I’m looking at exactly the same decision (for the same computer).

JokerMayCry

To copy your existing hard drive over to your SSD , it may also cause the partition “misalignment” and this may reduce the I/O speed of SSD, use the function “Migrate OS to SSD” in MiniTool Partition Wizard could avoid this “shortage”.

I can say only good things about Samsung EVO SSD’s. I bought 840 EVO 3 months ago for a cheap price. It works perfectly, not a single problem. Installation was a piece of cake, Samsung Magician software will do all necessary OS tweaks and preparation. Good choice, i don’t doubt that 850 EVO is best buy these days!

I forgot to mention one very important thing. I have done OS clone from my old mechanic HDD Hitachi through Samsung Magician, and I have to be honest and to say that i doubted it will work OK. But, things were totally different, everything is working nice, no problems even OS was cloned, completely satisfied and whole cloning operation takes about half hour to 40 minutes.

Harry Magnani

I have a Samsung Evo 128 SSD in my desk top as the main C drive but it is almost full> there is also a 2 terrabyte HDD. I would like to add another SSD but I am told that eveything on my computer has to be copied because I will lose it in the process and all software has to be redownloaded. Is this true or can it just be built in and added as a C-drive extension?

Nathan Edwards

You should be able to clone your 128GB drive to a new drive using the software that Samsung includes. You won’t have to re-download any software or lose any data on your 2TB drive that way. Then once you’re booting from the new SSD you can erase the 128GB and use it as extra storage.

zpontikas

Come on. You need to update this. Intel ssd 750 is out with game changing speeds.
A singe ssd is faster than the fastest raid-ssd installation…

It all depends on the scenario you are using the SSD for though. Wirecutter have picks for which will work for most people at the best price.

Not everyone will tell the difference between say a 250gb SATA SSD and a 250gb PCI-X x4 SSD and not everyone can make that upgrade etc.

SATA 3 SSD’s are still the most mainstream and the best in terms of price/performance balance.

ssdmananger

which requires a new motherboard for most people and wont work in a laptop…

ssdmananger

I think you have the runner up wrong. The MX200 should be the runner up, because like the 850 EVO, it has SLC caching making it faster. It also has RAIDED NAND to give it double the endurance and make it more resistant to failure. It has temperature throttling.

The MX200 is a sidestep from the EVO 850, the BX100 is the budget step down. The 500GB MX200 is 199, and the BX100 is 179. The dynamically resizing (something even the 850 EVO doesnt do) SLC Cache and doubled life expectancy is worth $20 to a lot of people (who want their drive to last.)

I enjoy very much your article. I have bought a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB and installed it on a mcbook pro mid 2009. So far so good but i’m worried about TRIM. Now that 10.10.4 has the possibility to enable TRIM, should i do it on this SSD drive or not?

I’m a little confused about this and worried if i’m ruining my SSD drive!

I have personally turned TRIM on my MacBook Pro after installing a new SSD (back when TRIM Enabler was the way to activate it). All was well, but I don’t know if that’s still the case. Will see what our resident expert has to say!

I bought the 750 GB version of the Samsung 850 EVO in March 2014. It failed in August 2014 and was replaced under warranty. The replacement failed yesterday. So, I got 5 months out of the original and 11 months out of the warranty replacement. Not a great track record. Installed on a mid-2010 Macbook Pro if that’s useful at all. FYI in case you’re revisiting the recommendation.

I miss reliability factor. Many vendors have had failures in the past and it would be great to know which SSDs are known for having stable firmware and no issues.

I remember recent issues with Samsung 840 EVO read performance which had to be fixed *twice* by Samsung. And no-one knows if they are really fixed for good. Also, some firmware updates bricked Samsung 850 series SSDs.

Reliability is important factor to take into account. But the problem is that it takes some years to know if the drive is reliable or not, and then after some years you cannot buy that model any more because the manufacturer has replaced it with some newer model, which again might have issues to solve during next years.

Oh, this technological progress sometimes drives me crazy – the chance for getting a reliable, time-proven product becomes lesser because manufacturers are pushing technologies to their limits and it always has high risks.

bableochaaru

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Jeremy Pabberton

I have a MacBook Pro 5,1 2.4 Core 2 Duo 15″ that I would like to keep working for awhile yet.

I think I want an SSD. My internal drive is 250 GB 5400 rpm HDD

and nearly full. I need a 500 GB drive. I also like the speed, shock resistance and durability of an SSD. And figure if the notebook dies I’ll throw the drive into my similar vintage Mac Pro as a start up drive.

Evo 850 sounds great but the Magician software doesn’t work on Mac which seems to eliminate RAPID and TRIM..What about Turbo? And encryption and power loss? Is the basic drive worth it without the software? At the top of my consideration list are Crucial BX100 and MX200 (does the MX200 software work on Mac?

Should I buy a Hybrid drive instead? In the last year I have replaced both the power supplly and battery — going to overpriced Apple components after suffering through failed third party ones. My Ram has been bumpedfrom 2GB to 5 GB but could go to 8 GB (with purchase of one 4GB stick).

I would get whatever size & brand SSD you want and use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to clone your current drives data over. I’m using the setup you want on my slightly newer MBP & it’s great. No bad slowdowns w/encryption that I can tell and TRIM support is close/here (although we advise against it right now). YMMV with the older Mac, but in my older 2009 White MacBook my SSD worked great & sped things up too.

Max Horn

Regarding the warning about TRIM on Mac OS X based on Linux evidence: I think you should consider updating the article regarding that. There are two original source I could trace down for reports about data loss for Samsung 8xx SSDs on Linux:

(1) The first is caused by a bug in the Samsung firmware which causes the SSDs to incorrectly report support for so-called “queued TRIM”, even though the drives do not support this correctly (this capability is relatively new in the relevant technical standards, and few operating systems and few drives support it yet). The Linux kernel is one of the few to support it, and subsequently, this could result in data loss. The Linux kernel developers since then added the Samsung 8xx series to a blacklist to avoid the problem. See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fstrim/+bug/1449005

Note that they explicitly clarify that they are NOT using queued TRIM, so this is a separate issue. But also note that the post was updated several times, and the last update clearly states that this was traced down to a bug (?) in the Linux kernel. While I have yet to find independant confirmation of this (i.e. somebody other than Samsung developers should confirm that the Linux kernel is at fault, not Samsung…), this still suggests that there should be no problem on Mac OS X and Windows.

As a final point, let me consider the following observation: Windows 7 and above always use TRIM on NTFS formatted drives (which is the default). There must be millions of Windows users with an Samsgung 8xx SSD. If there was a serious systematic data loss issue caused by TRIM, they would be complaining, loudly. Yet I couldn’t find anything.

In conclusion, it seems clear that enabling TRIM support on Mac OS X, is perfectly safe when using Samsung 8xx — and so far I have not been able to find any reports about people hitting issues due to this. Only rumors (typically based on points (1) and (2) above, and or FUD).

I couldn’t afford new Mac so I bought second hand. 5 years old it was a bit slow. so I had to upgrade from hdd to sdd. I choose 120GB and its enough for os and some files. For extra storage I am using NAS. But if you really need 500GB these guys can help with advice: http://www.span.com/price-drop-products/-32-

Bob F Barfoo

Good article – big fan of ssd too. Related article I’d like to see somewhere – toms hardware, consumer reports web site if not here….why the continuing large price premium for factory installed ssd hard drives? Go shopping at dell.com, hp,com, lenovo.com & start w/listed starting prices for a laptop. Now look how much the price increases for ssd – if ssd is available at all. Curiously enough – shop refurbished machine – newegg.com example – lots of ssd options & not a major premium for ssd.

I still see – as of August 2015 – an enormous price premium – way above cost of ssd part for ssd factory installed. Why?

I think honestly because the average joe has no idea and lets these co’s get away with it. Apple does the same thing. $50 worth of RAM or a SSD costs triple when it comes factory installed by them – and what’s worse is now they’re making upgrades yourself even harder – sometimes impossible – to do.

Matter of degree is what gets me curious to know why factory ssd price premium isn’t dropping. I’m typically seeing across the board – dell-hp-lenovo…charging between $400 & $500 for a $100 or less part factory installed. You’d think one or more vendor(s) would figure out they have a significant subset of customers (wirecutter.com readers for example….) who know the value & real price tag of ssd & would start charging less of a premium. Not to mention pick up some market share.

But this only applies if you plan on keeping your computer for at least another year or you know you can bring your SSD to your next computer. There’s no sense in upgrading a machine that you’re about to replace.

I have an Early 2011 13″ Macbook Pro with a 320Gb HDD and 4GB RAM . I’ve been thinking about upgrading to an SSD.

What if I just get a 60gb or 128 GB SSD (OWC or Samsung) and put my 320 GB where the optical drive is ( my optical drive doesn’t work anymore) . Is that a good idea ? Would this be good in the long term ? Or should I just get a 250GB or 500GB SSD and drop the 320 HDD that I have ?

I’m concerned about the TRIM issue – although i don’t quite understand it – which is why i’m considering OWC. I’m also on Yosemite and planning on upgrading to El Capitan when it comes out.

This is my exact current setup. Our pick for best SSD in my MacBook Pro’s main bay & a HDD in my SuperDrive bay. It’s been wonderful. Probably going to go larger SSD soon but I’m ok with the 500GB HDD. Highly recommend this setup, TRIM stuff not withstanding. Good luck!!

Ramo

That’s awesome that you have the same setup!

I’m still not sure how how big of an SSD I should go with given that I’ll still have the 320GB HDD. What do you suggest?

Also, should I be installing programs on the SSD while storing files on the HDD?

Go with at least 120GB. 60 like you mentioned is just too small. And yep, you want all your applications on the SSD and OS X will be able to find the actual file associations for other programs (iTunes, Photos) on the other drive.

Make sure you keep proper track of all the screws. Some are location specific IIRC and a HUGE PITA. If you have any other questions or anything just ping us!

Ramo

I’ll definitely keep track of the screws. Thanks for that tip !

I was almost going to buy either a 120GB or 256GB SSD and came across a Seagate 1TB SSHD for the same price as a 250GB SSD !

Because this guide is for SSD’s and not hybrids. Hybrids might be great, and viable options for some, but there is a fine line. We might cross into that territory someday, but as of now we don’t want to muddy things up.

Anne Petersen

TG862G-CT Is the modem I purchased for Comcast Phone/internet service. By the way it seems cheaper to rent for 3 years than to buy at the 299 price point

again

Whoever just added the blurb about the Samsung 950’s either doesn’t understand the SSDs they are reviewing, or completely failed to read the article.

WRONG: The new 950 Pro line is the first that uses Samsung’s 3D V-NAND technology”

RIGHT: The 850 EVOs and 850 PROs this article recommends both have 3D V-NAND. How can you write an article about the 850 EVO/PRO and not mention 3D V-NAND once?

The 950 Pro is special because it is the first consumer drive that communicates through NVMe/PCIe instead of just SATA. What that means is that it wont work in most peoples computers, unless they have a modern compatible motherboard. Here is a compatibility guide, for the SM951 (the OEM version of the 950, that has been out for a while) https://www.ramcity.com.au/blog/m.2-ngff-ssd-compatibility-list/189 The 950 Pro is not a drop in replacement for an 850 Pro, it requires an M key M.2 slot.

If you guys want to hire someone to write about this stuff, with attention to detail, reply and I can send in a resume.

Nathan Edwards

Thanks, you’re right; we’ve corrected the section.

As a matter of fact, we ARE looking for writers. I look forward to seeing your resume in our jobs inbox.

Rob Lewis

I would like to use the Samsung 850 Pro as a scratch disc for PhotoShop. I am a creative cloud member so I always have the newest most updated version of all Adobe products. I edit thousands of RAW image files per month.

Yes. There really is no affordable, appreciably faster option until PCIe drives come along. PCIe SSDs will be here (in volume) in a year or two, but if you want to buy something now, then a fast SATA SSD like the 850 Pro is about as good as it gets.

DidItWork

No, OCZ ARC 100 or Sundisc Extreme as developing RAW files demands high sustained read/write throughput which Samsung drives of this class are not ready for. You need a disk that can provide server-like performance.

Jamie

Samsung is known for many products but their NAND flash memory technology is just unbeatable.

Hi I have a Macbook Pro Mid 2009, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, & 8 GB Memory. I’m a graphic design student and looking at getting the Samsung 850 Evo or Pro 1TB SSD. I use most of the creative suite and will be moving into After Effects. Would the EVO be sufficient / fast enough or should i get the Pro? And is it compatible with my laptop. Thank you!

As long as its formatted properly, both would be compatible. I use the Evo, but the Pro is a bit better if you read the fine print. You’ll feel the difference with either!

dave777

I just finished updating older laptops, and no need to go expensive as many do SATA or SATA II but not 6gb SATA III. Thus they cannot use the speed of Pro, Extreme and a waste of money. Consider only reliability, compatability and price. Speed is of little importance for 5+ year old systems as they cannot fully utilize added speed if the SATA is 1.5gb or 3gb speeds. I used Crucial bx200 for the old laptops and EVO 850 500gb on a 6 month old i7 desktop. But the desktop is 6gb SATA III and can use it better. Crucial’s website also has a upgrade tool to check before you buy.

Allen Millington

Sandisk Ulta II is on sale enough at Newegg that it earns my personal recommendation 😀 I’ll be buying at least one. The prices put them at the absolute lowest $/GB on pcpartpicker.com which is superb for an overall solid drive.

Additional Details (sort of boring, but I feel like posting my thoughts anyway 😀 ) I’l likely go with the 480 GB. It only resonably holds around 350 GB when using 15% over provisioning and 15% free space for fragmentation reduction. Given that the only games that I play are Skyrim (a bit, need to get back to that), Starcraft II and a few other steam games, it should be enough.

brades123

@thetonykaye:disqus The hard drive on my Macbook Pro Mid-2009 recently crashed, and I am looking to replace it with an SSD. I have not upgraded any of the hardware since I purchased it, so I currently have the following.

I am debating upgrading my hard drive to the Samsung 850 EVO (500GB/1TB) or PRO (512GB). Would these be compatible with my current setup, and is there anything else I should upgrade in order to optimize my machine’s performance (i.e., up my RAM to 8GB)? I don’t use my macbook pro for any heavy gaming or graphics editing, but I want to be able to make it last as long as possible. Thanks for any input you have!

Any of our picks should work fine with your MBP. Since it’s an older model you should notice the difference compared to the HDD you previously had. While you’re in there I would highly suggest maxing out the memory too.

What I would do is find the best deal on the SSD’s you’re considering, then once you see a good deal jump on it. My personal – not as an employee suggestion would be to go with the EVO since it’s cheaper and in a 9 year old machine spending lots of money to upgrade doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Good luck & let us know how it goes!

brades123

Thanks, @thetonykaye:disqus ! I installed the 850 EVO 500GB as well as the Crucial 8GB Kit. I had an issue formatting the drive, so after some research I replaced the Hard Drive/IR Cable. Now, my computer is up and flying. Thanks again for your help!

Martin Watts

Now that you can enable TRIM on Mac OS (since Yosemite) what stable SSD’s would you recommend for Mac?

Thanks for your advice, been looking at the 850 EVO as they have dropped loads in price again!

Loek Sanders

Hey,

i have a quick question. I’m trying to build a computer for my company. I saw the DISK-SATA2-500GB at http://hardware.eu/cisco/disk-sata2-500gb.html. Is this something i can use, or should i look for something else or something cheaper. Many thanks.

Greetings

Brian

The new EVO 850 is much faster than the previous generation ssd in terms of transactions per second, and access time. It’s 5 times faster access., which means that lots of small scattered file accesses, like the web and CAD programs do are that much faster, it’s really amazing. That’s on my old winxp leneova x61’s the work fantastic now. I can run 6 GB of memory use, where half of it is virtual to the ssd, and barely notice a slowdown. Before, even with a good 250GB SSD it was unusable over the physical ram limit.

Unfortunately, I can not find anyway to upgrade my newer, win8.1, hp i7 3xxx notebook. The samsung migration software want’s AHCI, the hp bios says it will render my system unbootable. There are endless horror stories for people trying to get Samsung, HP and win8.1 to all play well together. They usually end up with the needs to buy a new OS. Acronis is a big listed fail. Trying to talk to Samsung support is well near impossible, their support pages don’t work.

Of course Microsoft made sure making up and restoring you win1.8 computer is as difficult and risky as possible, and win10 is even worse.

I’m ready to give up on the Samsung drive, and try Crucial. It’s really frustrating. I’m a computer scientists, and help other people install and fix their PC’s, and I can not get it to work, nor find a save path to even try.

This might be something you’d have to look into with a forum. While we can often give advice for most things, what you’re asking for is a bit too difficult. I would suggest a forum for your exact machine. There has to be someone that has done this before with your exact model computer. Good luck!

Chris

If given the choice between the 2.5″ SSD and the mSATA EVOs, which is better to get? They’re sitting about the same price on Amazon.

I’m interested in potentially getting a NAS with SSD drives rather than spinning disks. After a bit of searching it appears there is some precedent for that. I’d like to hear your thoughts about it on the wirecutter.

yes and before posting my previous comment I searched that guide for any occurrence of “SSD” but came up empty :-/

Tony Dimou

Hello Tony Kays
After reading your article about SSD I decide to upgrade my MacBook .
Early 2008 MacBook 4.1, Intel Core 2 Duo , 2.4 GHz , 2G B RAM,160GB HD,
Serial ATA Intel ICH8-M AHCI.
I am curently running MAC OS X 10.6.8.
I will First upgrade RAM to 4GB with a kit from OWC and then to SSD 250GB.
I consider Samsung EVO 850 250GB , Crucial MX 200 250GB and OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD drives .
Please advise are the all the above SSD compatible with my old MacBook and which is the best option to your opinion ? I ‘m interested first for reliability and after for speed .
Can I enable trim with Mac os x 10.6.8 or I don’t need it with these options?

Well that model MacBook has a SATA I controller, so I cannot be 100% positive that all our picks will work. They should work, just at a slower speed.

bolshed

Thanks for the great review.

There’s something else I never see reviewed and it’s how much the SSD’s slow over time and how technologies like TRIM, DuraWrite etc are helping this.

I’ve decided to buy the Sandisk Pro 240GB for my Dell Optiplex 780 because of the speed and long warranty but I’m still not 100% sure. I have a friend who’s a big fan of OWC and tells me that DuraWrite is way better than TRIM and it will keep my SSD’ speed over time. In the same time I see that OWC’s model with DuraWrite that he suggests (Mercury Pro) is about 5 years old (still keeping quite high price though). Of course I would prefer the one that keeps it’s speed through time. Do you have any data on that? Everyone is testing the new drives’ speed but no one knows how much of that speed they will have after 1-2 years time of usage.

Also can you advice me on a PCIe card I can put in my PC so I can get the full SATA3 performance since my PC has SATA2 only? My PCIe slot is ver 2.0, 16x.

Thanks.

NoDisplayName123

In my scenario, I plan to get the 250GB version of the EVO. Right now in my OEM Windows 10 Dell machine I have a 1TB harddrive that I plan to re-use. Considering I’ve been having problems with Windows lately and wouldn’t mind starting fresh, would it be better to just make backups of the 1TB harddrive, make a Windows 10 Reinstall drive, install the SSD as the main drive, install Windows on it, wipe the 1TB drive and then recover my backup to the harddrive? Is it as easy as that or will I run into problems? One problem might be that it might not let me install it to the new SSD without a Windows 10 activation code – which I do not have considering I “upgraded” to Windows 10 from an OEM version of Windows 8.1. In that case would my best bet be to go with: backing up my personal files and then deleting them off the harddrive, cloning the entire drive to the SSD, making the SSD the main drive, wiping the harddrive, reinstalling Windows 10 on the SSD and then recovering my personal files to the 1TB harddrive. The problem here is that, even with the cloning, will Windows still recognize that it’s new harddrive and thus instruct me to input an activation code? I really wouldn’t want to have to buy a whole new key for Windows 10 to do this.

Anyway, I’m new to all this so any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

Andy Howard

if you have upgraded for free Microsoft will have logged your motherboard details. you can then, if you desire, format your drive and do a clean install from a previously downloaded win10 install media (dvd or memory stick). when asked for an activation code you just select ‘skip this’ and continue. after install has completed windows will already have checked online and activated your copy so your good to go. I tried this using an old hard drive so as not to wipe my main drive, just to see if it worked and it did, so I guess changing the hard drive is not considered a major change.

Bo Hill

How on earth did the OWC Mercury SSDs not make it in this article?

kft_ns

I purchased a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD from Amazon in sept 2015 and installed it in my Toshiba Portege. I recently upgraded to W10 and have experienced repeated problems. The repair shop where I took my laptop told me that the SSD is faulty, so I went back to Amazon. They offer only a 90 day warranty and advised me to contact Samsung. I thought that wouldn’t be a problem – they offer a 5 year warranty, so imagine my surprise when they told me that Amazon is not an authorized dealer, and that Samsung products purchased from Amazon or their sellers do not have Samsung warranty. So if you want to buy the recommended Samsung SSD, don’t buy from Amazon!

Amazon is an authorized retailer IIRC. I had one of my personal EVO SSD’s replaced by Samsung (after 90 days). I gave them the model number/serial number, they sent me a paid shipping box for the return & a new SSD. Contact them again – unless you bought from a 3rd party on Amazon that isn’t authorized and that’s the issue maybe? Or if Amazon recently stopped being an authorized retailer and we’re not aware.

I’m so glad I read the entire thing before rushing off to get the 850 Pro. I have an old mac, so it’s back to good ol’ MacSales.com! Bless them.

Gadgetman

I bought a PNY CS1311 240 GB for $60 (preordered it on Amazon, now the price is higher) and very happy with it, so far. At the price even a cheapskate like me could not resist.

May

Hi, could you please tell me whether upgrading to the Samsung 850 EVO or 850 Pro would be worth it for me/have a significant performance impact?

I have a mid-2009 2.66GHz-processor MacBook Pro that’s already been upgraded to 8GB RAM (the maximum), and the hard drive was replaced with a 7200rpm/500GB one about 2 years ago, when the original crashed.

I don’t want to upgrade to a new MBP, but my current MBP also isn’t snappy as it once was. I would categorize myself as a medium to heavy user; in addition to the usual emailing, web-surfing, and word-processing, I also occasionally edit images, audio, videos, and code.

You should notice a bump either way you go (850 Evo or 850 Pro). Since you’ve maxed out the ram you’d probably be perfectly happy with the Evo’s performance after adding it. Plus, you’ll keep costs down, which is always nice with an older machine.

Vincent

Hello,
Your MacBook Pro is equipped with SATA II (3 Gbits/s) and you are going to buy a SSD that is made for SATA III (6 Gbits/s) meaning that you will pay for SATA III but will use only SATA II….

Jon

The MyDigitalSSD (MDD) BP5e has gotten great reviews at TomsHardware and TweakTown. It is VERY close to the EVO 850 in performance, and has TLC and a similar TBW. BUT at today’s prices it’s about $100 LESS!

OK, but shouldn’t the BP5e be considered as the best runner-up than any of the other options, including the now discontinued BX100?

curtisls87

As I read the article, I could see that cost was a primary consideration – which is probably true for your intended audience, however, a secondary consideration that appears is the presence/absence of in-lens image stabilization, yet really, there are only two telephoto zooms listed. In my experience, most of the shorter lenses with IS like the 12-35mm Panasonic really don’t need IS.

This last point is, I admit, a pet peeve of mine, but 35mm are only “full frame” in the sense that the image circle of the lens matches the size of the sensor. In that sense, m4/3 is also “full frame.” APS-C is a crop-sensor design as the image circle is larger than the sensor. I suppose for the purpose of explaining FOV that having a 35mm equivalent is handy, when discussing, but there are “full frame” and crop-sensor cameras in medium format, too, but no one would ever say that. Like I say, it’s my pet peeve, and I know this was geared toward new users, but I’d rather they got the whole picture (pun intended). 🙂

Vincent

Thanks for the nice review.

“And the 512GB version of Crucial’s new MX200, which includes disk cloning software and full-disk encryption, is only $25 more than the BX100.”
The 512GB version of the MX200 does not exist. It comes in 256GB, 500GB or 1TB.

I have a macbook pro 15″ mid 2010 and another one 15″ early 2011.
Just have ordered a 500GB MX200 to upgrade the early 2011 which already use a Crucial M4 256GB since 2011. No issue at all with the M4 which is going on the mid 2010 now.

We like the MX, but prefer the Evo, and like the Pro as the best if you have the money to spend.

joel

hello everyone,
I need your assistance, if possible to help me with upgrading my macbook pro 15inch mid 2010 model, running on 2.4ghz intel i5, 4gb ram 1067MHz ddr3 and Intel HD graphics 288mb. Running on os x el capitan.
I wanted to know the best option for upgrades and any recommendations as well, I am on a tight budget but will do what is necessary to ensure the speed is improved on the mac.
Please please I would really appreciate anyone else here especially moving everything from the old HDD to the new SSD as in what softwares and device to purchase.

ps. I live in the UK

please get back to me if possible

joel

Also any recommendations on what type of ram I can use to upgrade and by how much?
(would you require the serial number for upgrades?)

Henrik

Google macsales.com they sell Ram & SSD and much more for your MBP. I believe max Ram for your MBP is 8GB, I could be wrong. On their website they have a section where you can input your computers information then their system tells you which SSD & Ram are optimal for your specific computer. You can even chat with CSR while on their website. They also have videos and written tutorials that show you step by step how to replace your SSD & Ram. They also explain which tools will be needed and of course they sell those too. CS is great and their products are top notch.

Gary Halpin

FYI, the Other World Computing SSD’s (m.2) are absolutely horrible. Tried 3 of them, all caused computer to crash and pretty much wasted 40+ hours of my time. Plus, they are not easy to deal with on returns.

Tornadotuan

Hi Hardware Community,
I want your opinion on a special decission making. Especially now that enough time for longtime-endurance tests has passed.

Anyway, I can´t choose between the Samsung EVO 850 1TB v2 (289€) and die SanDisk Extreme 960GB (281€).
So pricewise the “Pro” is even cheaper right now compared to the Samsung. But there are some obvious differences:

My usage:
– Client for everything: gaming, programming, office, multimedia – everything
– gonna split it in system and data-partition
– gonne be in laptop that´s used as desktop
– battery is wasted, so no concern about power consumption

So, usually I use hardware until it´s broken so meaning about 8-10 years.
Still I want steady performance without sudden decline in speed like with the EVO 840 :C

I´d be really glad, if you could tell me your opinion on this 🙂
BTW. my system is a Dell Vostro 3450, i5 Ivybridge, ATI M6650.

Greetings!

Zac Paul

If you want to use the drive for 10 years or more, I think investing in the 850 PRO is worth it. The EVO is a good drive, but it does not have the error-correction abilities of the PRO due to differences of the NAND inside. Beyond being more reliable, MLC NAND lasts longer. The 850 PRO will last unusually long, and an endurance of 5-10+ PETABYTES with the PRO is easily doable.

The SanDisk Extreme PRO uses MLC NAND, so it is a better drive than the EVO even though there are some areas where the EVO is slightly faster.

David Paddock

I can understand not recommending the 950 NVMe drives for non-pro’s–there are potential technical hurdles plug-and-play users might not have the stomach for–but to recommend the 850 Pro instead makes no sense. The 850 Pro is barely faster than the 850 EVO in most scenarios. The 950 Pro, by contrast, is 3 to 4 times faster in sequential read/write capability and markedly faster at a minimum doing everything else.
Anyone who cares enough about performance enough to be considering something faster than an EVO should be using NVMe. By the time the 10 year warranty on the 850 Pro runs out, you will have ditched it in favor of something bigger and faster twice over.

So the Pro (or EVO) would work in Macbook pro 15″ mid 2010
(MacbookPro6,2), i7, 2.66. 8GB? I have read different things; I know it
can’t take advantage of the true power, because it is SATA II, but it is compatible, correct?

I work a
lot with Adobe Suite, including Captivate 9, which currently slows to a
crawl and is almost unusable on my computer. I am (reluctantly) willing to pay the money for a 1tb PRO; would it be
worth it or am I simply asking too much of my machine? Should I just buy the 500 EVO? (Or buy the 1tb EVO or PRO in the belief that it will be worth it in terms of bringing it into a new machine?)

In general, would I really notice the difference between 500/512 gb and 1 tb?

Thanks for your advice.

Zac Paul

A SATA 3 SSD will work with a computer that is SATA 1 or SATA 2…it will just be capped by whatever SATA revision you have, in what is often called “negotiated link speed.”

The 850 PRO is worth the money. It’s perfection and it is so reliable and so long-lasting that it is almost ridiculous. The PRO uses MLC flash where as the EVO uses TLC. MLC is usually faster, more reliable, and will last longer. Most TLC drives are nowhere near as good as the EVO, and the EVO is an exception to the rule of the inferior TLC drives that have smashed the market. The SanDisk Extreme PRO and the Transcend 370 both use MLC NAND as well, and the Transcend 370 is very competitively priced.

You will not notice any different between a 250, 500gb drive and a 1tb drive because your SATA 2 connection is going to cap your transfer speeds at around 300 MB/s, which is about half the speed of what modern MLC SSDs are capable of if using a SATA 3 connection.

Apple laptops now use PCIe connections for their SSDs, as this allows speeds far higher than SATA 3. The most recent PCIe SSDs are writing at over 2,500 MB/s, where as SATA 3’s limit is around 600 MB/s. So you cannot use this drive in new Apple laptops, and Apple Desktops are now also utilizing PCIe. Nonetheless, you can still use the drive by putting it into an external enclosure for a very fast portable hard drive. As Apple is now moving to ThunderBolt 3, ThunderBolt 3 enclosures will be able to max out multiple SATA 3 SSDs for very, very fast data speeds.

freediverx

“A SATA 3 SSD will work with a computer that is SATA 1 or SATA 2…it will just be capped by whatever SATA revision you have”

Not necessarily. As I posted out in a separate comment, 2009 iMacs only support SATA 2. Although in theory SATA 3 drives should provide backward compatibility, it turns out that in this case a SATA 3 drive would only operate at SATA 1 speeds instead of SATA 2.

Zac Paul

Is this only particular 2009 iMacs as I have not had that problem? I have a Crucial M4 in my 2009 iMac, I believe a version 10,1. It is a SATA3 SSD. It’s read and write speeds are both around 300 MB/s, which is exactly where SATA2 is saturated at.

Thank you for sharing an awesome information. I’m glad Apple stepped up the game and started implementing the new PCIe SSD in there which is based on NVMe SSD, yet the connector not m.2.

Joice Vidal

Hello,
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009), 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3. I have upgraded the memory, but now my mac is reaalllyyyyyyy slow. I was reading that if I change my HDD to a SSD, it is going to be faster. I’d like to buy a 1TB because I need space for a database that I want to install on it. what’d be my best option?
Thanks in advance.
Joice

Zac Paul

What do you want most? Speed, reliability, longevity, or value? If you want the first three, the Samsung 850 PRO is the industry standard. The SanDisk Extreme PRO is the closest second to the 850 PRO. The Transcend 370 is a drive that is fast, very reliable, priced very low relative to its quality, and is seriously under-rated and overlooked by many tech writers.

With the less expensive drives, you will still get reasonably fast real-world performance, but a sacrifice in endurance and reliability, and those sacrifices can sometimes be significant!

Sam Wood

Hi,

Thanks for all the great advice! I am looking for a SSD for my Acer Aspire M5. I noticed that your previous pick was Crucial’s MX200, but you have not yet updated your review to include the new MX300, which was just released this summer and is ~$30 cheaper than the Samsung Evo 850. What do you think of the MX300? Does it match up to the Evo 850 now that it has the 3D NAND technology? They seem similar in speed and quality, so I am considering getting the MX300 instead since it is a bit cheaper.

Thanks!
Sam

Zac Paul

The MX-200 is an incredible drive that used top-binned Micron MLC NAND and a Marvell controller. The MX-300 is an inferior product because it has dumped MLC NAND in favor of TLC. Check out the Transcend 370. This drive uses top-binned Micron MLC for about the same price as mid-level TLC drives. It will last longer, and it is made from NAND that is inherently more reliable. If you want the absolute best performance, the absolute best longevity, and industry setting reliability & consistency, then the 850 PRO is arguably the best. Those things can write petabytes and petabytes of data, and the real-world endurance of 10 PB is something the 850 PRO is theoretically capable of doing. I have one with over 1 PB and SMART data suggests this has barely made a dent in the life level remaining.

Performance-wise, the MX-300 falls far short of the EVO. The EVO is an odd drive in that it is faster than some MLC drives even. For everyone else, many/most TLC drives cannot deliver comparable real-world performance.

Ceci

I’m a bit confused, and want to confirm. Will the main pick work on a macbook (late 2011 13-inch macbook pro)? You suggest OWC’s SSD for that model, but it seems to me that the main pick will also be compatible. Is the issue with the enabling of TRIM? Just want to clarify what the top picks would be for an older (non SSD) macbook pro. Thanks in advance.

brucerb

??? They recommended the OWC for the 2013 MacBook Pro, the article doesn’t mention the 2011. Any SATA SSD should work fine in the 2011.

Clifford Chan

what about KIngston?

perejil

My V300 120GB died today; 4 years old, therefore I got here.

Zac Paul

If a potential Buyer wants top reliability, I strongly encourage purchasing either the Samsung 850 PRO, Intel 740, SanDisk Extreme PRO, or Transcend 370. These products use top-graded MLC. While some TLC drives like the 850 EVO or SanDisk Ultra 2 are very good products, going with superior MLC has reliability benefits. Additionally, the Transcend 370 is priced about the same as mid-level TLC drives, but it uses top bin Micron MLC NAND, which is much, much, much more desirable than TLC.

One option for those on a budget is to purchase two SSDs. For example, a smaller 850 PRO where you install the OS and keep all important files, and a larger TLC drive where you keep less important data.

DRailroad

Worst SSD line on the market. Can’t for the life of me figure out why these 84/850 drives receive great reviews and ratings.

We use Samsung, SanDisk and some Crucial drives. While we’ve experienced failures on the SanDisk and Crucial drives, the Samsung products have by far had the largest number of failures.

Additionally, Samsung is also the worst vendor for support. Due to the number of Samsung SSDs, 840 and 850 series failures, EVO and Pro, we decided to start submitting warranty claims rather than simply discarding the faulty drives as we have in the past. We’re almost better off discarding the faulty drives after dealing with Samsung support (or what THEY classify as support). First, when submitting warranty claims through the Samsung support portal (adjacent to the respective, registered drives), after completing the required SSD documentation (SNs, Models, purchase dates/invoices, etc, etc), the Samsung system acknowledges accuracy and receipt of our data. However, when selecting the link to complete the claim for final submission, we constantly receive an error message that Samsung is unable to process the claims, every time, emphasis: EVERY TIME. Doesn’t make any difference what time of the day, Samsung will not process the final claim submission. We instead have to phone a toll free number (more wasted, irreplaceable, valuable time). Every time, again no matter what day, what time of the day, etc, a support representative advises that the system is undergoing maintenance.

Folks, if Samsung’s system requires THAT much maintenance, it’s time to upgrade from the 4341’s (IBM).

Regarding SSD usage, almost every one of these faulty Samsung SSDs had very low hours (usage, writing …) on them. They have mostly been sitting idle. Ironically the ones with heavy writes have experienced far fewer failures.

While SSDs are far more “fragile” than HDDs, and they are all subject to failure, we’ve converted to SanDisk. Even when we do have the infrequent SanDisk failure, SanDisk’s support is FAR more efficient, responsive and virtually painless to deal with compared to Samsung.

Can you tell me the model and eventually from where is the TV stand you have this TV put on ?

freediverx

Important note for those upgrading older systems, such as the 2009 iMac…

OWC strongly recommends “the use of a SATA 2.0 (3Gb/s) SSD. While a 6G SSD does function, it will only do so at SATA Revision 1.0 (1.5Gb/s, 150MB/s) speeds rather that the SATA Revision 2.0 (3.0Gb/s 300MB/s) speed the computer can deliver.”

brucerb

This may be true for OWC products and some others, but is not true of all SATA III drives. There is an issue where some SATA IIi drives installed in Macs that use the NVidia MCP89 AHCI SATA interface (some 2009-2010 iMacs, Mac minis, and MacBook Pros) will only perform at SATA I speeds although the interface should support SATA II. However, I have such a Mac with a Samsung 830 SSD (SATA III) and it is running correctly at SATA II speeds. I’m not aware of a definitive list of which SSDs will or will not work at SATA II speeds in these Macs so it is something the user should be aware of. Also, SATA II drives (that are not SATA III) have probably been out of production for years, although OWC appears to still have them.

FarmarJanne

totally agree, none of my apples are compatible

Tiexin Guo

I’m not sure if the title fits.

Yes regarding price/performance ratio, no doubt 850 EVO is a great choice. In fact it is what I’m using right now, and even the same size.

The Samsung EVO 850 is a SATA SSD not m.2 the 960 PRO is M.2 calling it the big bro is flawed the The Samsung Pro 850 is its big bro as they’re both SATA SSD however the 960 pro is an entirely different monster and to use it you need a board with m.2 and to get the most out of it you will need to use x4 pcie mode which means using 4 pcie lanes that will in some cases with some boards mean utilizing lanes that could be used for your Graphics card so instead of using the Graphics card in x16 mode you will be only using x8 mode if you only have 16 lanes or if you have two cards in SLI/Crossfire you might not get x8x8 since you are using x4 for your m.2 and the board does not have an additional 4 lanes specifically for m.2 but if you switch to SATA mode you loose your max 10Gbps advantage of the M.2 drive and you only get the max 6Gbps you would with a standard Sata III SSD. In conclusion the 960 Pro is the big brother of the 960 Evo both are M.2 and the 850 Pro is the big brother of the 850 Evo Both are Sata III.

Joe Bob

are you on some special kind of autism-inducing drug?

Dan

Explain why you made this statement.

QuarterSwede

Probably because you didn’t use any punctuation.

Dan

Thank you, and yeah I should probably fix the grammar errors but I don’t have enough time to give a fuck about it.

tkballgame

I would like to see a list of BT speakers that allow users to disable the auto off feature (for maximum Amazon Echo Dot compatibility) via buttons or apps or, at the very least, while connected via the AUX cable.

JLE

Not an audiophile here, so I’m trying to determine this: If I want computer speakers for under $50, would it make sense to purchase the DKnight and also enjoy the extra bluetooth/portability, or go for something like the Logitech Z200, a “traditional” computer speaker setup?

Steve Duffey

I bought a 1TB Samsung EVO 850 recently in the M2 2280 format. While I’ve had success with other Samsung SSDs this one could not clone the boot sector of the original drive. Tried using the Samsung Migration Tool as well as several 3rd party disk cloning programs but without success. Eventually I just had to return the drive.

Dan

You mean to say you bought a 1TB Samsung EVO 950 recently in the M2 2280 format.
The 1TB Samsung EVO 850 is a SATA SSD not m.2.

mmg8888

Based on this review I purchased a Samsung Evo 1 TB SSD to install in a 2011 iMac. Unfortunately, the drive immediately had trouble mounting on the desktop after initialization, and over the next several days, it could not be seen by the computer unless entering recovery mode. I ran a surface scan of the ssd by using an external drive to boot the computer, and after over three hours, over 200 bad blocks were found; so, I stopped the process and returned the drive. I’m very happy that I bought it through Amazon Prime, so there was no question about returning it. I purchased the Crucial drive described in this article. No bad blocks were found with a surface scan, and the ssd has performed flawlessly since installing it. I also believe this is a better purchase because Crucial offers support for for Macintosh computers.

mmg8888

Well, only 6 months after two new Crucial SSDs were installed into separate iMacs, they have failed, even after using the programs recommended by Crucial to test the drives. They don’t make it easy to return the drives. Next up. SanDisk.

The Great Salt Lake

Now that availability is better, I would love to see the 960 evo thrown into the mix to see how it compares.

thatgirl

If I were upgrade my mid-2009 MBP to SSD should I purchase the largest size I can afford and then in the future when MBP dies I use SSD for backups?
my machine is in fantastic condition and it’s a 17″ … that I love.

I”m looking at Crucial MX300 …

LiveJoX

Great. What about external portable SSD? How do they compare to the gold standard: Samsung Portable SSD T3. It remains cold even after booting Mac and working from it all day long. Really remarkable!

grahamtriggs

Every Samsung storage device I’ve ever owned has failed in short order.

And every Samsung notebook I’ve seen inside doesn’t contain a Samsung drive.

That pretty much sums it up for me.

antifanboyz

Sucks to have such bad luck that’s counter to the predominant experience and data!

Dennis

Would also like some SATA II recommendations for older computers. Can you add a low cost or budget pick for older computers that cannot take advantage of SATA III? Has anyone found a low cost SSD around 64gb or 120gb? I have a few older macbooks that I would like to upgrade to SSD but do not want to invest a lot given how old they are.

coakl

SATA-3 drive will work fine on SATA-2 connection. It will simply max out at SATA-2 speeds. Example: I have a SATA-3 SSD running in an old Pentium 4 that only has SATA-1 ports. I’m not getting SATA-3 speeds, but that machine feels much faster.

Dennis

I should have clarified. I was not asking for SATA II due to compatibility, I was asking for SATA II for lower cost. I know the newer drives will work, but they were too expensive to justify upgrading an old white macbook, which I have several.

Richard

How do you activate native data encryption on any of these SSD?

JPaul Johnson

I just bought a Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboard that has 3 M.2 slots. I want a fast and long-lived SSD and am considering the 850 Pro and the 960 Pro. My primary usage is photo editing and my cameras produce 20-50Mb files. I’m probably leaning toward the 850 Pro for the warranty, but I’m torn by the speed difference of the 960 Pro. Do you think I would notice the difference?

Richard Octovianus Oey

yes you will notice the difference, especially when open many pictures in one go. it’s like fast to super-instant
why? because 960 pro is a m2 slot provide larger bandwidth than 850 pro (sata)
=====
to you folks if looking for best ssd http://lemmebuyit.com/best-ssd/

GardnerHoodCanal

Hood Canal Gardner

GardnerHoodCanal

A bit of an oldie needs some help with upgrading his late 11″ macbook air with a WD 500GB Blue SATA III 2.5″ Internal SSD. Q 1 is it doable? Q2 Will I need an adapter “kit” of some kind or just be sure not to lose the screws in the process? Thanks in advance for any help. ted